The other day I went to a book talk by Megan Kimble about her new book, City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America’s Highways. It was really good, and my partner and I bought a copy. I’m excited to read it. Kimble is a journalist, and the book works hard to avoid being a boring urban planning text book. It focuses on narrative storytelling to tell the story of the interstate highway system and how it’s decimated communities and hurt people. It also follows new and old resistance to urban highways. After her talk, she invited reps from Ocean Beach Park, Connect Oakland (tearing down I980), and Vision Boulevard (tearing down the Central Freeway), all of which are at different stages in the process. Ocean Beach Park will be on the ballot in San Francisco along with the Community Transit Act, which is organized by friends and will tax Uber, Lyft and Waymo to fund the bus! I’ll probably publish a lil voting guide before the election.

There’s something so cool about riding BART between Ashby and MacArthur. The 70s viaduct is just the right height and profile to make you feel like you’re getting an intimate, impossible view into a neighborhood. Unfortunately, MLK, the street BART runs above, is a former red-lining (painful irony) boundary, and BART construction came with a road widening that made MLK even more of a barrier.

SEPTA just released designs for the M5, the badly needed replacement for the Market-Frankfurt line’s M4s, which have been unreliable since they were delivered. From one city with a streetcar+metro tunnel under Market Street to another, ❤️.

And in NYC, new student OMNY cards are launching, giving students 4 entries a day to the transit system, all year, at any time. No more metrocards capped at 3 fares a day only between certain hours. Hell Gate