simansfield.bsky.social
@simansfield.bsky.social
Mass transit prostelyizer. Big into integrated city regions Into transit, politics, nature, maps, technology, architecture, proto-futureism, touching rocks 📍west yorks
The West Leeds Dispatch, here, actively encouraging its readers to object to the mildest of road changes. Comments as you'd expect.
Traffic order offers last chance to have say on £2.9m Armley Town Street revamp - West Leeds Dispatch
By John Baron Armley shoppers and businesses can have their say on £2.9 million scheme which could see part of Armley Town Street become bus only. The scheme aims to […]
westleedsdispatch.com
One core fact of megaproject management (that equally applies to any largish endeavor) is that planning is comparatively cheap, but lack of planning leads to expensive missteps and redesign. One reason for exploding American transit costs is the lack of funding and state capacity for planning.
dereksagehorn.bsky.social@dereksagehorn.bsky.social · 5h agoPolicymakers need to be internalizing the costs of inaction/delay via escalation much earlier in the life cycle of infrastructure development, imo.
Leaders of flag-raising group Raise the Colours Oxfordshire placed trackers on highway workers’ cars to find out their home addresses, the High Court has heard. RTC then attempted to intimidate the highway staff into no longer removing flags by repeating their addresses to them.
New piece from me: Getting over the 2030 energy bill bump On how we're in a period of unusually high energy bills that we should be able to escape from - but only if we start making serious progress on electrification www.nesta.org.uk/blog/the-ene...
The energy edit: getting over the 2030 energy bill bump
Every six weeks Andrew Sissons assesses the most important signals and trends underpinning the UK’s energy transition.
nesta.org.uk
Can’t get this story out of my head. The delays aren’t unusual, the cost comes out at $100k per unit or ~$400/month rent for those non-market homes. Same issues come up for market housing, developers could keep building at lower rents if munis did not impose those delays and uncertainty.
Ryan Jabs@ryanjabs.bsky.social · 2d agoAnother window into why even non-profit housing is so expensive. Saanich delays led to an extra $9milliom (!!) in costs. No one in Saanich is held accountable so they keep dragging their feet and increasing costs. bcbusiness.ca/real-estate/...
I recall we had a period of time where the response of Starmer and Cooper to concerns about these groups was ‘I like flags’
Oxford Clarion@oxfordclarion.bsky.social · yesterdayLeaders of flag-raising group Raise the Colours Oxfordshire placed trackers on highway workers’ cars to find out their home addresses, the High Court has heard. RTC then attempted to intimidate the highway staff into no longer removing flags by repeating their addresses to them.
Final Toronto thought. This is a completely insane way to run a Tram system. What is wrong with the city, why don’t they even seem to care about the streetcars
UK is so NIMBY they’ve created a AI-supercharged objection software to flood local gov’ts with comments. "The ban on email submissions has had a particular impact on ObjectNow, a service which generates objection letters to planning applications with the help of AI."
AI flooded the Scottish Government with wind farm objections. So they stopped accepting emails
The Scottish Government says the move was needed to tackle the "burden" caused by the growth in AI-assisted objections to energy projects. Critics say it is a way to mute public opposition.
theferret.scot
DSA-aligned Democrats are now the most pro-free-trade voting bloc in the United States, in an incredible turn of events www.theargumentmag.com/p/who-suppor...
This is, imo, absolutely the consequence of politicians, media figures and others being actively unwilling to condemn this behaviour
Charles EP Murphy@cepmurphy.bsky.social · yesterdaynews.sky.com/story/nhs-st... stereotypically this has been seen as Old People, but not only would the old people of now have often been born post-Windrush, lot of this will be younger people who've always lived in a diverse Britain. The guy with a pregnant wife likely millennial at oldest
Cities dismantled their tram networks to become “motor cities of the future”. The result? You could travel further within 30 mins via public transport in 1957 than you can in 2026. Cities are seeking billions to rebuild networks. Incredible piece of work this.
The Exchange@theexchangeleeds.bsky.social · 2w agoIf 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.
The state of this. A lovely day out for Badenoch and Philp, playing dress up and making pronouncements about early release schemes - having left the country with one hundred available men's prison places, after fourteen years in charge. You read that right. One hundred places.
I did assume that this was a case of a local organisation having totally lost the plot, but Kemi Badenoch is now forcefully and explicitly defending the selection of a former neo-Nazi with a significant criminal history as a candidate. Crackers and terrifying.
Mark Chadbourn@chadbourn.bsky.social · yesterdayKemi Badenoch certainly seems to be advancing with her agenda to turn the Conservatives into Reform.
I'm not going to QT but there's a silicon valley NIMBY complaining about maintaining the historical character of Palo Alto and man that place should look like fucking singapore. Market cap of tech companies based in and around there is like $14 trillion and it's full of fucking bungalows? So broken
This is more Markey performative nonsense. The right answer is to use the money to electrify commuter rail and make it accessible. Way more ROI on that! www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/03/m...
Pointing to Massachusetts’s fare-free experiment, Markey, Pressley press for a $25 billion federal free transit plan - The Boston Globe
The proposed legislation points to the success of free bus pilots that federal lawmakers say made Massachusetts a “national leader in fare-free transit policy."
bostonglobe.com
Imagine a bank closing the accounts of the sitting president and the reason listed is money laundering. Just imagine the appropriate level of political scandal that something like that should cause. Now imagine the leading newspaper of the country, @nytimes.com, not writing a word about it
Allison Gill@muellershewrote.com · 2d agoNEW: Capital One closed hundreds of Trump accounts for money laundering. We wouldn’t have known if Trump hadn’t sued. Now he’s got tax immunity. My latest: www.muellershewrote.com/p/new-capita...
When you look globally, there are many more countries that consistently abandoned street-running railways in the postwar years than ones that retained them. The simpler answer is that technology, decaying infras and the zeitgeist killed streetcars everywhere but in a bunch of countries.
Christof Spieler@christofspieler.bsky.social · 2d agoI think the conspiracy is comforting to people -- "a few bad guys did this." The reality -- "electeds, planners, and most of the public believed that the car was the future and rail transit was outdated" is actually more unsettling since it raises the question of what we're getting wrong now.
The most fustrating thing here is that the Govts record on climate and net zero is actually very good... ... we just entirely refuse to discuss it. Even in the context of unprecedented temps caused by climate change
Josiah Mortimer@josiahmortimer.bsky.social · 2d agoAsked: "Does government take climate change seriously?" the PM's spokesman replied simply: "Yes."
Heartbreaking to listen to both victims' impact statements at court. And definitely felt gross to me seeing them walk out smiling. discover.swns.com/2026/08/thug...
Thugs who spat at and pelted gay couple with fruit avoid jail - Discover SWNS
This is the moment two vile thugs chased a gay couple down a street before they hurled fruit and spat on them during a shocking homophobic attack.
discover.swns.com
Nigel Farage just took a question from a 'journalist' at his press conference, who turned out to be his former chief adviser Raheem Kassam, who asks him why the media are being so unfair to him
Quite the stat, via @londoncentric.media “the 119,000 residents of Camden who pay income tax contribute more (£4.7bn) than all the residents of Birmingham and Glasgow combined (£4bn).”
Quoting András, not the offending post because I don’t want to pile on…one thing that has made me a “the phones are in fact bad for you” are the sheer number of people who take zero responsibility for what they see when they scroll and put zero thought into what they are replying to.
András Forgács W@andraswf.bsky.social · 2d agoI'm sorry that YOU CAN'T BE ARSED TO LOOK AT WHO OR WHAT YOU ARE REPLYING TO
Why do so many progressives want this? I just don't get it.
Al@btown85.bsky.social · 2d agoThe pressure on kids too! In Berlin they get divided after the 6th class (12). My eldest already under so much pressure (despite us trying to remove it) to do well in exams etc to ensure she’s at the gymnasium. Parents going nuts in regards to it. They’re 9!
NEET numbers are primarily a labour market issue not an education one. We know this as numbers have also risen in Wales and Scotland which have different education systems.
Jim Lauder@mrjlauder.bsky.social · 3d agoFirst, on this bit, Reeves and Starmer are culprits more so than Tory edu ministers - min wage hikes, emp NI, new workers' rights (all stuff I agree with in the abstract) all piled on at once... Yes, you're going to get a NEETs issue. That's pretty basic economics.
Becoming my most recurring bit, now:
Oz Katerji@ozkaterji.bsky.social · 3d agoThis is how Restore Britain, sorry I mean Restoration, talks to working class northern Labour members in Red Wall seats who say they care about Ukraine. Do not under any circumstances vote for these charlatans for the Labour NEC.
(I get that Bluesky is very obviously the Wow We Loved Lockdowns website but I think it's absolutely fine, five years after the fact, to wonder if we got the balance right between "protecting older people" and "making sure younger people weren't getting entirely shafted", arguments are allowed)
