Something a bit funny about this question...

Lovely New York Central System poster from 1946 by American illustrator Leslie Ragan (1897-1972). The feeling you must’ve gotten as a visitor to the US during the steam engine boom must’ve been one of looking into the future.

Building cities for people shouldn't be a radical idea. The real hostile, unnatural design is blanketing our communities with massive parking lots and urban highways.

Planners: read this.

Richard Murphy@richardjmurphy.bsky.social · yesterday

Much of what is said about economics is little better than gaslighting.... I used AI tools when writing this post, including a spell checker. I also used 50 years of experience writing about these issues. The drawing was the smallest part of all that, and I had no budget to do it any other way.

Publicity drawing for Forton services on the M6 near Lancaster, 1963.

Now who'd have thought that strong controls on sprawl would be actually beneficial?

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith.com · last wk.

These crazy wildfires in Spain and France have only destroyed “hundreds” of homes? LA’s 2025 fires destroyed 18,000. Noncombustible materials and a tight wildland-urban interface are probably a better strategy than clearing vegetation and spacing out houses. www.nytimes.com/live/2026/07...

Anti-Car sticker spotted in Buxton, UK

Norma Jean Osborne (1956): Public parking revenues should subsidize bus service. Car dependency was not a choice. It was and is the deprivation of choice.

On the night of 2–3 August 1944, nearly 3,000 Roma men, women and children were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Today, on European Roma Holocaust Memorial Day, we honour the victims of the Roma genocide and reaffirm our duty to preserve their memory.

I've started a new long distance walk! This one I made up myself, following the A272, a road familiar from my schooldays. Here is the rather unglamorous start, in Stockbridge

Every day the BBC news updates on the number of people who’ve crossed the channel in small boats. But somehow this isn’t newsworthy. Just the collateral damage of a motorcentric society

20's Plenty for Us@20splenty.bsky.social · 6d ago

For the 5th consecutive year child casualties have flat-lined at around 13,000 road casualties of age 16 and under. In what other area of life would the death or injury of 13,000 children be "acceptable"? The government has a Road Safety Strategy that aims to reduce child KSIs by 70%.

It's extraordinary that the UK temperature will range from 13 to 36 during a SINGLE day. Is this itself a record?

James Peacock@peacockreports.bsky.social · 5d ago

Monday has been subtly trending hotter, with the latest UKV suggesting a 36°C peak in the London area. Like with last Wednesday it’s a flash in the pan with mainly mid-high 20s in England the next day.

Canicule : à Bordeaux, les 40 °C atteints six fois en 2026, contre cinq fois sur les 75 années précédentes 🔗https://l.sudouest.fr/yNp3

Lowest ever Rhine water flow measured at the German-Dutch border in July was 782 m³/h, in 1976. Now, we're at 680 m³/h!

Very astute post. We have seen in UK really high standards applied to rail which then drives people onto roads where they face much greater risks. But govt washes it'd hands of any responsibility.

Warren Wells, AICP@warrenjwells.bsky.social · 6d ago

It's striking to see the *actual* commitment to 'safety as first priority' from US airlines, in stark contrast to lip service played by state DOTs.

This can't be right, I thought we were told just this week that renewables didn't work. www.businessgreen.com/news/4533681...

Renewables met a record 52 per cent of UK power demand in 2025

Record output from offshore wind and solar saw the share of electricity provided by renewables jump yet again, the latest government statistics confirm

businessgreen.com

⚒️ With over 220 tunnel kilometres excavated, the completion of the EU co-funded Brenner Base Tunnel is one step closer! 🇦🇹🇮🇹 Miners have now connected Austria and Italy via two main railway tunnels ↓

Car dependency was not a choice. It was and is the deprivation of choice. Facing isolation in a new suburb of Pueblo, Colorado, Thelma Holtz and Ruth Connor collected 284 signatures on a petition for bus service. “We all want a bus badly” Connor said. “Thelma and Ruth” is a movie I’d like to see.

#OnThisDay 180 years ago the LSWR opened from Clapham Junction to Richmond with stations at Wandsworth, Putney, Barnes and Mortlake. Richmond was rebuilt with this art deco building opening in 1937, and beautifully restored last year. Image: @SW_Help buff.ly/5PFwXgx

When I see "Waymo saves lives" op-eds, I always do a quick search to see what the author has written extolling protected bike lanes. Or automatic speed cameras. Or road diets. The results are always the same: Nope. Nada. Zilch.

That is how England should plan! Not "building round stations in the green belt".

Marco Chitti@chittimarco.bsky.social · last wk.

At the same time Livorno, which was a booming port town at the time, way bigger than Pisa, got a brand new, quite out-of-town through main station coupled with a major urban expansion plan covering the area between it and the city center. A story similar to Karlsruhe and Prato.

Absolutely zero surprise that Janan Ganesh is not happy with Burnham and Manchester framing. He cites Paris as some kind of justification for Londons dominance. 1/2

I keep bumping into half-arsed commentaries imagining 'growth' if it wasn't for those pesky Green Belts. No need to imagine anything! Just look at the new land uses between Hull and Beverley as a powerful - and not wholly reassuring - counterfactual

Craigavon, Northern Ireland, was declared a New Town on this day in 1965. Controversial in NI's sectarian politics from the outset, it never fulfilled its early modernist promise but it is now a popular place to live with a population of around 65,000, about half that initially projected.

And yet they don't even have "discretionary planning system".

The Korea Herald 코리아헤럴드 @thekoreaherald.bsky.social · 2w ago

A record-low number of South Koreans in their 20s and 30s owned their own homes in 2025, while the percentage of financially-challenged homeowners also marked the lowest ever. www.koreaherald.com/article/1082...

"Progress"

The Exchange@theexchangeleeds.bsky.social · 2w ago

If you stood on Briggate at 8am on a weekday in 1957, and stood there again in 2026, in which year could you reach more of the city in half an hour? Samuel Bancroft has crunched the numbers. Since the 1950s, Leeds has got bigger - but the city has effectively shrunk.

Finally! Main stream media clocking on to the big problems created in 1979 by the destruction if decent sources of income for local authorities.

Just finished the High Weald Landscape Trail. Horsham to Rye.

So funny, in their enthusiasm for Houston, I've never heard the anti planning lobby over here call for less parking. Wonder why?

Evan@evan7257.bsky.social · 2w ago

How can Houston keep growing and stay affordable? Cut parking minimums. | Editorial www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/edit...

‘The US is the country where the fact of an ageing population does the most to exacerbate inequalities of wealth and power. It leads the way in letting the old hold on to what they have and making the young pay the price.’ David Runciman on gerontocracy. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

David Runciman · The Cult of Longevity

We don’t have a politics of what works so much as a politics of what older citizens won’t notice. All human beings...

lrb.co.uk