Daniel sent us this one — he spent an hour and a half trying to walk across Jerusalem to pick up a package, and every street he tried was blocked for light rail construction, no signage, no detour markers, Google Maps cheerfully directing him into one cul-de-sac after another. His core question is: how do well-run cities actually manage the coordination of major infrastructure projects, the notification of route changes to residents, and the provision of alternative ways of getting around? And what does it mean for tourism when even a ten-year local can't navigate on foot?
This is the thing that drives me absolutely up the wall. And I say this as someone who's lived here for decades — I've watched Jerusalem dig itself into a knot and then act surprised that nobody can untie it. But here's the part that makes this worth talking about beyond just venting: this is a solvable problem. Other cities have solved it. The gap between what Jerusalem does and what's possible isn't about budget or technology — it's about whether anyone in charge thinks pedestrian experience matters at all.
What does a ninety-minute walk through a construction zone tell us about how cities should and shouldn't manage infrastructure? Because the prompt isn't just a complaint — it's pointing at something systemic. The city is spending billions on public transit that's supposed to make the city more walkable, and in the short term it's made the city unwalkable. That's a tension worth unpacking.
The tension is real because the project itself is necessary. Jerusalem's J-Net light rail expansion is projected to cost eight and a half billion shekels — that's about two point three billion dollars — and add four new lines by twenty twenty-eight. When it's done, it'll connect neighborhoods that have been transit deserts forever. The long-term vision is genuinely good urbanism. But the short-term execution is a masterclass in how not to manage disruption.
The interesting thing about the prompt is that he wasn't trying to drive. He wasn't even trying to take the bus, because the bus route was severed by the same construction. He was walking. And walking should be the resilient fallback — when everything else fails, you can still use your feet. Except when you can't, because the sidewalks are torn up and the streets are barricaded and nobody thought to put up a sign saying "if you're on foot, go this way instead.
That's the core failure right there. And it points to something I've been thinking about for a while: there are three pillars that make infrastructure coordination actually work during major construction. The first is real-time notification systems for route changes. The second is the physical provision of alternative pedestrian pathways. And the third is cross-agency communication between construction authorities, transit operators, and mapping services. Jerusalem fails on all three.
Let's take those one at a time. Real-time notification — what does that actually look like in a city that does it well?
The gold standard right now is what Singapore's Land Transport Authority mandates. Every single construction project, public or private, has to update a central API within two hours of any road closure, any sidewalk closure, any change to pedestrian access. That API feeds directly into Google Maps, Waze, and local transit apps. If a contractor closes a street at nine in the morning, by eleven the mapping services know about it and are rerouting people automatically. It's not optional — it's a condition of getting a construction permit.
So by the time most people are heading out for lunch, the maps have adjusted. Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, a street can be closed for three weeks and Google Maps is still telling you to walk down it like nothing happened.
That's because Jerusalem doesn't provide a municipal data feed at all. Google Maps relies on a combination of user-reported data and official municipal feeds. If the municipality isn't sending the data, the only way Google knows a street is closed is if enough people report it — which takes days, sometimes weeks. I checked this morning: there are closures on King George Street that have been in place since March, and Google Maps still routes pedestrians straight through them.
The prompt describes Google Maps directing him into cul-de-sac after cul-de-sac. That's not Google being stupid — that's Google working with bad data. Garbage in, cul-de-sac out.
And this exposes a genuine gap in the mapping industry. Google Maps processes something like twenty billion miles of driving directions daily. For cars, they have sophisticated traffic data, they have Waze integration, they have user reports. But there is no standardized pedestrian closure data feed. GTFS — the General Transit Feed Specification — is the standard format for transit agencies to share bus and train schedules with mapping apps. It's why you can open Google Maps in Tokyo or London or New York and get accurate transit directions. But there's no equivalent standard for pedestrian closures. OpenStreetMap has a construction tag you can apply to paths and sidewalks, but it's wildly underused because there's no mandate for cities to populate it.
We've got a data standard problem layered on top of a municipal indifference problem. But the data piece is only pillar one. What about the physical signage — the actual on-the-ground experience of being a pedestrian who encounters a closed street?
This is where Barcelona's Superblocks program is the case study everyone should be studying. Starting in twenty sixteen, when Barcelona closed streets to cars as part of their Superblocks initiative, they knew they were going to disrupt pedestrian routes too. So they deployed what they called urban informants — people with tablets stationed at every closure point whose entire job was to update digital maps in real time and help pedestrians find alternative routes. They also placed physical QR code signs at every closure. You scan the code with your phone, it pulls up a live map showing exactly how to get around the closure on foot.
They stationed actual humans at construction sites to help people walk around them.
And it worked. Between twenty sixteen and twenty nineteen, pedestrian accidents in Superblocks areas dropped sixty percent. That's not a rounding error — that's a dramatic improvement in pedestrian safety during active construction. And the QR code system meant that even when the urban informants weren't there, pedestrians had access to current routing information.
Compare that to the Jerusalem experience. You encounter a barrier across a sidewalk. There's no sign. There's no QR code. There's no detour arrow. There's not even a "sorry for the inconvenience" poster with a contractor's logo. There's just... And the unspoken message is: figure it out yourself.
If you're a tourist, figuring it out yourself means pulling out your phone, opening a map app that has bad data, and wandering through unfamiliar neighborhoods trying to guess which alley connects to which street. Jerusalem's tourism industry generated three point two billion dollars in twenty twenty-three, and sixty percent of visitors cited walkability as a key factor in their satisfaction. You are actively damaging a three billion dollar industry because you can't be bothered to print some signs.
The prompt mentions this — "I hope to the tourist who wants the city to be explorable face" — I think he was typing fast and it came out garbled, but the point is clear. If a ten-year local who knows every corner of the city can't navigate, what happens to someone who arrived three days ago and doesn't speak Hebrew?
They have a miserable experience, they go home, and they tell their friends Jerusalem is an impossible city to visit. Word of mouth is the most powerful marketing in tourism, and Jerusalem is generating terrible word of mouth right now among pedestrians.
Let's dig into the cross-agency piece — pillar three. The prompt mentions that the bus couldn't get through either. So we're talking about the Jerusalem Municipality, the Light Rail Authority, and the bus company — Egged — operating in separate silos.
This is where it gets maddening. When a street closes for J-Net construction, the Light Rail Authority knows about it — they're the ones doing the work. But that information doesn't automatically flow to Egged. Egged has to figure out on its own that a route is blocked, design a detour, and implement it — often with a lag of days. And neither the Light Rail Authority nor Egged pushes that data to Google Maps or Apple Maps or Moovit. So you've got three separate organizations, each holding a piece of the puzzle, and none of them talking to each other or to the public.
The left hand is digging a hole, the right hand is driving a bus into it, and the head is pretending everything is fine.
The feet are just trying to walk somewhere. What's striking is that this isn't a hard technical problem. The data formats exist. The APIs exist. The coordination models exist. Tokyo handled over twelve hundred concurrent construction projects during the twenty twenty Olympics build-up — twelve hundred — with a ninety-five percent public satisfaction rate for pedestrian rerouting. They did it with a centralized Construction Coordination Center that required every contractor to update a shared GIS system in real time, which then fed a public-facing dashboard showing every closure, every detour, and estimated completion dates.
Twelve hundred concurrent projects. Jerusalem's light rail expansion is, what, four lines? And they can't manage signage for one of them?
The scale difference is almost comical. Tokyo deployed a system that could handle twelve hundred projects, and Jerusalem is struggling with a fraction of that. And Tokyo didn't just do the digital piece — they painted colored lines on the pavement to mark pedestrian detours. You could follow a blue line on the ground and it would take you around the construction zone and back to your original route. No phone required. No language skills required. Just follow the line.
That's such an elegant solution. It works for everyone — locals, tourists, people who don't have smartphones, people whose phones are dead, elderly people who struggle with map apps. Paint on the ground. It's almost insultingly simple.
It's cheap. Paint is cheap. Signs are cheap. QR codes are essentially free. The expensive part is the coordination — having someone whose job it is to think about the pedestrian experience and make sure the information flows. That's a staffing decision, not a budget decision.
Let's talk about the technical mechanism that underpins all of this, because you mentioned digital twins earlier and I want to go deeper on that. What does a digital twin actually mean in this context?
A digital twin is essentially a real-time three-dimensional model of a city that's continuously updated with data from sensors, construction permits, traffic cameras, and field reports. Singapore has one — it's called Virtual Singapore. Helsinki has one. They use it to simulate the impact of construction projects before they break ground. You can model exactly how a street closure will affect pedestrian flow, car traffic, bus routes, emergency vehicle access — all of it — and design your detours and signage plan before the first barrier goes up.
Instead of closing a street and then figuring out what happens, you simulate it first and have a plan ready on day one.
And the digital twin stays live during construction. If something changes — if a contractor needs to extend a closure by three days, or if a new sinkhole opens up — the model updates, the API pushes the change to mapping services, and the public-facing dashboard reflects it immediately. Jerusalem doesn't have a digital twin. The municipality doesn't even have a unified GIS layer that all departments can access. The planning department has one map, the transportation department has another, and the construction authority has a third, and they don't always agree on what's closed.
That explains why the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing — they're not even looking at the same map.
They're not even in the same room looking at different maps. They're in different buildings, in different departments, with different budgets, and different political appointees running each one. There's no single person or office whose job is to say "okay, if we close these three streets simultaneously, here's what happens to pedestrians, here's what happens to buses, here's what we need to communicate.
The prompt mentions something that I think gets at a deeper issue — there's an assumption baked into how Jerusalem operates that pedestrians are an afterthought. The construction planning prioritizes vehicle traffic, then transit vehicles, and pedestrians come last, if they're considered at all.
That's visible in every decision. When a street closes, the first thing that gets signposted is the car detour. There'll be big orange signs saying "detour via Street X" for drivers. But pedestrians get nothing. The assumption is that pedestrians can just... figure it out. Find another way. And sure, pedestrians are more flexible than cars — but that flexibility has limits. You can't walk through a ten-foot-deep excavation. You can't walk through a concrete barrier. And when the detour adds forty-five minutes to a thirty-minute walk, the system has failed.
There's a misconception that construction chaos is inevitable — that when a city undertakes major infrastructure, disruption is just part of the deal and there's nothing anyone can do about it. The Tokyo and Barcelona examples show that's not true. What else disproves it?
Portland, Oregon has a system called the PBOT Construction Map — PBOT being the Portland Bureau of Transportation. It's a live map of every street closure in the city, with filterable layers for pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers. Contractors are required to update it via a mobile app. If you're a pedestrian planning a route, you can pull up the map, filter to show only pedestrian-relevant closures, and plan accordingly. It's not fancy. It's not AI-powered. It's just a map that's kept current by people whose job depends on keeping it current.
The barrier here isn't technical sophistication — it's institutional will. Jerusalem could implement a Portland-style construction map with off-the-shelf tools. The fact that it hasn't suggests that pedestrian experience simply isn't a priority.
That's the uncomfortable political reality. Pedestrians don't have a lobby. Drivers have a lobby. Construction companies have a lobby. Bus riders have a constituency. But the person who walks from their apartment to the market to pick up groceries — nobody's organizing on their behalf. They're just individually frustrated, and individual frustration doesn't translate into policy change unless it reaches a critical mass.
The prompt is essentially one person's frustration hitting that critical mass and asking: what would it take to fix this? And the answer seems to be: not that much, actually. A centralized data feed. A person whose job is to think about pedestrians.
Let me add one more layer to this, because I think it's important. There's a knock-on effect that doesn't get talked about enough. When you make a city unwalkable during construction, you're not just inconveniencing people in the short term — you're training them to stop walking. You're pushing them into cars or taxis or just staying home. And once people switch modes, they often don't switch back. If the light rail is supposed to create a more walkable, transit-oriented city, but the construction process drives people into cars for three years, you may find that when the trains finally start running, your ridership is lower than projected because people have reorganized their lives around driving.
That's a scary feedback loop. You build transit to reduce car dependency, but the construction process increases car dependency, and by the time the transit is ready, the car dependency is entrenched.
There's research on this. Disrupted pedestrian routes during extended construction correlate with lasting mode shift away from walking — especially among elderly residents and families with young children. If you're seventy-five years old and the sidewalk outside your apartment has been impassable for eighteen months, you've probably stopped walking to the grocery store. You're taking taxis or relying on family members to drive you. And when the sidewalk finally reopens, you may not go back to walking — you've established a new routine, and walking feels less safe or less familiar than it used to.
The prompt mentions that the walk passed through or near ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods. Those communities tend to have large families, lots of children, and a high proportion of pedestrians — many families in those neighborhoods don't own cars at all. So the disruption isn't hitting everyone equally. It's disproportionately affecting the people who depend most on walking.
And elderly residents. And anyone who can't afford a car or a taxi. The people who are most vulnerable to pedestrian disruption are the people the system is supposedly designed to serve — the ones who will benefit most from expanded public transit. It's a bitter irony.
Let's look at the Tokyo example more closely, because the scale of what they pulled off is impressive. Twelve hundred concurrent projects. A centralized coordination center. Colored detour lines on the pavement. What was the institutional structure that made that possible?
The key was that Tokyo created a single office — the Construction Coordination Center — with authority over all contractors, public and private. Every construction permit in the city was conditioned on real-time reporting to the Center. If you didn't update the GIS within two hours of a change, you got fined. If you repeatedly failed to update, you lost your permit. The Center had a public-facing website that anyone could access, showing every active closure, every detour, and estimated completion dates. And they had a staff whose entire job was pedestrian experience — walking the detours themselves to make sure the signage was clear, the paths were safe, and the routes made intuitive sense.
They had people whose job was to walk the walks.
And they achieved a ninety-five percent public satisfaction rate. During the most intensive urban construction project in Tokyo's modern history. That's not a miracle — that's competent management.
When we say Jerusalem is handling this poorly, we're not being unfair. We're comparing it to a standard that other cities have demonstrated is achievable.
It's worth saying: this isn't about money. Tokyo spent money on coordination, yes, but the coordination paid for itself in reduced complaints, reduced accidents, reduced traffic congestion from lost drivers, and reduced economic disruption. Barcelona's urban informants program wasn't expensive — it was a few dozen people with tablets. Portland's construction map is maintained with existing staff. Singapore's API mandate costs the government almost nothing to enforce because the cost falls on contractors, who factor it into their bids. None of this is budget-breaking.
The misconception that "Google Maps and Waze already handle construction rerouting effectively" is worth addressing directly. The prompt describes Google Maps failing repeatedly — directing a pedestrian into dead ends over and over. Why does that happen?
Because Google Maps handles car rerouting based on traffic data. If a street is closed to cars, drivers slow down, stop, turn around — the system detects the anomaly in traffic flow and reroutes. That works reasonably well for cars. But pedestrians don't generate traffic data in the same way. A pedestrian encountering a closed sidewalk doesn't create a detectable anomaly in Google's data — they just turn around and try another street, and Google has no way of knowing that happened unless the pedestrian manually reports the closure.
The very thing that makes Google Maps good at car routing — passive data collection from millions of phones moving at car speeds — makes it bad at pedestrian routing during construction, because pedestrians move differently and generate different data.
And the fix isn't for Google to get better at detecting pedestrians — it's for cities to provide the data directly. Google would happily ingest a pedestrian closure feed if one existed. The problem is that no city provides one in a standardized format. GTFS solved this for transit schedules. We need the equivalent for pedestrian infrastructure.
Somebody needs to invent the General Pedestrian Closure Feed Specification. Rolls right off the tongue.
It's a terrible acronym, but the concept is sound. And OpenStreetMap already has the tagging infrastructure for it — they've got a construction tag that can be applied to footways, sidewalks, pedestrian paths. The data model exists. It's just not being populated systematically because there's no mandate for cities to do it.
The pieces are all there. The data models exist. The API infrastructure exists. The coordination playbooks exist. The paint exists. What's missing in Jerusalem is the decision to care.
That's the uncomfortable conclusion. And I want to be careful here because I love this city and I've lived here for most of my adult life. But the pattern is consistent: Jerusalem treats pedestrian experience as an externality — something that happens to other people, outside the scope of municipal responsibility. And that's not just bad urbanism; it's bad economics. A three point two billion dollar tourism industry depends on people being able to walk from the Old City to Machane Yehuda to the Israel Museum without feeling like they're navigating an obstacle course designed by someone who hates them.
The prompt ends with what I think is a plaintive question — what about the tourist who wants the city to be explorable? And I think the answer is: right now, that tourist is getting a raw deal, and the city doesn't seem to notice or care.
It's not just tourists. It's residents. It's the person trying to pick up a package. It's the family trying to get to synagogue on Shabbat. It's the student trying to walk to Hebrew University. The entire pedestrian experience of Jerusalem right now is degraded, and the degradation is being treated as an unavoidable side effect of progress rather than a failure of planning.
Let's pivot to what other cities can learn from this, because Jerusalem is hardly the only city undertaking major transit expansion. Light rail, bus rapid transit, bike lanes — cities all over the world are trying to reduce car dependency, and they're all going to face the same tension between long-term walkability and short-term disruption.
The Jerusalem model is a cautionary tale. The "short-term pain for long-term gain" narrative only works if the pain is manageable. If the pain is so severe that it drives people into cars, destroys local businesses along construction corridors, and poisons public opinion against the transit project itself, then you haven't managed the transition — you've botched it. And there are real political consequences. If residents associate light rail construction with three years of misery, they're going to vote against the next transit expansion, even if the expansion is good policy.
Bad execution doesn't just make people miserable in the moment — it undermines the political coalition for future projects. You're borrowing against your own credibility.
Jerusalem's credibility on this is already strained. The original light rail line took years longer than projected and went massively over budget. The J-Net expansion is repeating the same pattern — delays, cost overruns, and a construction process that seems actively hostile to the people who live here. At some point, voters stop believing the promises about completion dates and start asking whether the whole thing is worth it.
Which brings us to the actionable question. If you're a city planner, or a concerned citizen, or just someone who's tired of walking into dead ends, what do you actually do about this?
I think there are three concrete things. First, cities need to mandate a pedestrian impact assessment for any major infrastructure project — similar to environmental impact assessments. Before you break ground, you have to document exactly how pedestrian routes will be affected, what alternative routes will be provided, and how you'll communicate changes to the public. If you can't answer those questions, you don't get a permit.
That seems so obvious it's almost embarrassing that it's not standard practice.
It's not standard because pedestrian impact isn't a regulatory category in most cities. Environmental impact is. Traffic impact is. Noise impact is. But pedestrian impact? Nobody's measuring it. So the first step is just making it a thing that gets measured and reported.
What's the second thing?
Mapping companies need to adopt a standardized pedestrian closure data feed. Google, Apple, Waze — they all benefit from GTFS for transit data. They'd benefit just as much from a pedestrian equivalent. And cities that are serious about walkability should pressure them to create the standard and then commit to populating it. This is a case where the tech industry and municipal governments need to collaborate, because neither can solve it alone.
The third thing?
The third thing is something listeners can actually do. If you encounter an unmarked closure in your city, report it. Report it to your municipal three-one-one system if you have one. Report it to Google Maps. Report it to OpenStreetMap. The more data points that exist, the harder it is for cities to pretend the problem doesn't exist. And advocate for open data policies that require construction companies to share closure data in real time as a condition of their permits. This is something city councils can mandate, and they'll do it if enough people demand it.
The individual reporting piece is interesting because it's a collective action problem. One person reporting a closed sidewalk doesn't fix anything. But if reporting becomes normalized — if enough people do it that the data becomes impossible to ignore — it creates pressure for systemic change.
It also directly improves the maps for everyone else. Every time you report a closure on Google Maps, you're helping the next pedestrian avoid the same dead end. It's a small act with immediate local benefit and potential long-term systemic benefit.
There's one more angle I want to explore before we wrap up — the AI angle. We're in twenty twenty-six, AI-powered traffic management is becoming more common, and I'm wondering whether the same data pipelines that optimize car traffic could be used to optimize pedestrian routes.
They absolutely could, and this is where I get excited. The same sensor networks and machine learning models that predict car congestion can predict pedestrian congestion. If a city has a digital twin that's updated in real time, an AI system can simulate pedestrian flow around construction zones and generate optimal detour routes automatically. It can push those routes to mapping apps, to digital signage, even to augmented reality navigation on phones. The technology exists. It's not science fiction.
It requires the city to collect pedestrian data in the first place. And right now, most cities collect car data obsessively and pedestrian data not at all.
That's the bottleneck. AI doesn't solve the data collection problem — it amplifies whatever data you already have. If you have rich pedestrian data, AI can do amazing things with it. If you have no pedestrian data, AI can't help you. So the first step is still the boring institutional stuff: mandate data collection, create the APIs, staff the coordination office. The AI is the fun part that comes after.
The invisible coordination layer of cities — the thing that makes some cities feel effortless and others feel like a hostile maze — is increasingly going to be AI-mediated. But the AI is only as good as the data infrastructure underneath it.
That data infrastructure is only as good as the political will to build it. You can't outsource political will to an algorithm.
Let's zoom out for a second. The prompt describes a specific frustrating experience, but it's pointing at something bigger: the gap between how cities present themselves and how they actually function at the ground level. Jerusalem presents itself as a world-class city, a destination for pilgrims and tourists, a center of history and culture. And then you try to walk from point A to point B and you discover that the city can't even manage basic signage.
Every city has a brand and a reality. The brand is what the tourism board puts in brochures. The reality is whether you can walk from your hotel to a restaurant without wanting to scream. And the gap between brand and reality is where reputations are made or broken. Jerusalem's brand is "the eternal city, spiritual home of three religions, must-visit destination." Its reality right now is "bring comfortable shoes and a backup phone battery and maybe a compass and also lower your expectations.
The compass might not help if the streets don't connect the way they used to.
The compass will tell you which direction you're facing while you stare at a concrete barrier. It won't tell you how to get around it.
To wrap this into something coherent: the core failure in Jerusalem is a coordination failure, not a resource failure. The city has the money to build an eight and a half billion shekel light rail system. It doesn't have the institutional machinery to manage the pedestrian disruption that construction creates. And that gap — between capital investment and operational competence — is what turns a thirty-minute walk into a ninety-minute ordeal.
The fix is not mysterious. It's been demonstrated in Tokyo, in Barcelona, in Singapore, in Portland. Real-time data feeds. Pedestrian impact assessments. A person whose job is to care about people who walk. None of it requires a technological breakthrough. It requires a decision that pedestrians matter.
The question the prompt leaves hanging is whether Jerusalem will figure this out before the J-Net expansion is complete, or whether the city will spend years making itself unwalkable in the name of becoming more walkable, and then wonder why nobody trusts the next infrastructure project.
I'm not optimistic in the short term, but I'm hopeful in the long term. The fact that people are noticing, complaining, documenting — that's how change starts. The prompt itself is a data point. It's someone saying "this is not acceptable, and I can see that other cities do it better." That's the first step toward demanding better.
Alright, let's pull out three concrete takeaways from all of this. First, for cities: mandate pedestrian impact assessments for major infrastructure projects, and condition construction permits on real-time data sharing with mapping services. If Singapore and Tokyo can do it, so can you.
Second, for the tech industry: build the pedestrian closure data standard. GTFS revolutionized transit navigation. We need the walking equivalent. Google, Apple, OpenStreetMap — someone needs to lead on this.
Third, for pedestrians everywhere: when you hit an unmarked closure, report it. Municipal three-one-one, Google Maps, OpenStreetMap. Every report makes the system slightly better for the next person. And advocate for open data policies in your city. Show up at city council meetings. Be the squeaky wheel.
The squeaky pedestrian gets the signage.
The squeaky pedestrian gets the painted line on the pavement.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: The word "clockwise" only stabilized in English after mechanical clocks became common in the fourteenth century. Before that, the Old English term "sun-gang" — meaning "sun-going" — described the same direction, because sundials in the northern hemisphere cast shadows that move that way. When early medieval Norse explorers reached Newfoundland around the year one thousand, they brought portable sundials with them, meaning the concept of clockwise was literally carried across the Atlantic by Vikings tracking the sun's path in a land where the daylight hours didn't match anything they knew from home.
Vikings exporting the concept of clockwise to Newfoundland. That's a sentence I didn't expect to hear today.
I'm bringing that back.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review wherever you listen — it helps more people find the show.
