A 125 St subway should be a slam dunk. But at $7.7B and with stations more than 100 ft underground, it would be the most expensive subway in the world, and cost riders more than 5 minutes every trip before ever stepping on a train. By using international best practices & building more shallowly,
Play Your Tubes Right
Which London Underground journey is faster? Test your tube knowledge!
Penn Station redesign can increase volume of train traffic by one-third: feds
A study by the feds says there’s untapped potential in the tracks beneath New York Penn Station — and that a series of changes can be implemented in Penn’s upcoming redesign to improve train throughput by up to 33%.
The cost of driving versus using a bike and transit (or: how to save over $7,000 a year)
I thought it would be fun to find out: how much money did I save in 2025 by cycling and using transit compared to using a car as my primary way of getting around?
Ode to the Shanghai Metro - Phoebe Lemon
Wayfinding has many applications, and arguably the most important one is public transportation systems. Granted, there are many different ways to design such a system, and the politics and culture of the environment in which it will be integrated certainly plays a large role. Interestingly, often when we discuss transportation systems on the global scale, individuals are so quick to praise New York or London’s metro systems, Europe’s “high speed” rail system, or how “Uber is the most original new technology cities have seen”. All of these statements are subjective, but somehow they’ve become accepted fact, especially in the West, and I argue that anyone who gives European/American public transport that much praise is blissfully living in a bubble. As an international student who grew up in America and has visited most of its major cities, lived in China for two years, and is now studying in the Middle East, I’ve had the opportunity to use almost every public transportation system to exist. Old fashion taxis, the Maglev, high speed trains, shared bikes, shared mopeds, carpools, the bus, the metro, I have used them all, but nothing quite compares to the way China does public transport.
Gary Marcus on Twitter / X
Sheer insanity. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta collectively are spending more money than the Manhattan Project *every single month*. More than 12x the Manhattan Project every year.And what they have got to show for it? None are making major profits on AI; none has a… pic.twitter.com/1XeMRxDcQX— Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus) April 29, 2026
Plan the Geary metro right, right now
Part 1: Strong corridor; tight station spacing; frequent trains
The 15-minute city isn’t a conspiracy: it’s already here
Conspiracy theorists have the plot wrong but the symptom right: economic hardship is already limiting how far people can go
Railway raises $100M Series B to unburden the builders
Railway has raised $100M to unburden the builders, unlock the creatives, and unleash human potential
Google's TPU Paradox
Why the massive Anthropic deal ($50-80 billion over six years) is a map to a thousand-customer problem.
The world’s most liveable cities in 2024
Our sister company has rated the best, and worst, cities in which to live
A Modest Proposal for Funding Transit Instead of AI
In the ’60s, the Bay Area almost got a high-speed train from Marin to San Jose. What could happen if we dreamed big again?
Urban congestion relief experiments through routing-app interventions
Traffic congestion remains a persistent challenge for urban mobility, increasing travel delays and elevating CO2 emissions. The widespread use of smartphones and GPS navigation creates new opportunities to mitigate congestion through routing optimizations in apps, yet real-world evidence for the effectiveness of such interventions is limited. Here we report large-scale empirical experiments evaluating routing-based traffic interventions on ~100 highly congested road segments across 10 major US cities. By rerouting a small share of Google Maps trips from targeted congested highway and arterial segments to less congested alternatives of equivalent road-classes with comparable travel times, we observe a city-average 2% increase in vehicle speeds on the intervened segments, along with improved travel times 0.7% and potential annual reductions exceeding 1,000 tons of CO2-equivalent emissions per city in the majority of studied locations. These findings provide evidence that marginal routing interventions involving a small proportion of vehicles can measurably enhance overall road network efficiency, offering a practical pathway to easing congestion and advancing urban sustainability.
Will New Technology Make High-Speed Rail Obsolete?
Do new technologies undermine the case for fast trains?
Designing a wayfinding concept for Vancouver's Skytrain system.
I wasn’t always a big fan of public transport.
How to Price Effectively: A Guide for Managers and Entr…
Pricing decisions are among the most important and impa…
