#public-transit
28 episodes
#5305: The Empty Cup Is a Timer: Rethinking Remote Work Spaces
Cafes fail remote workers for one reason nobody lists: the guilt structure. Here's what to optimize for instead.
#5291: The 100-Hour Bus to Lima
From a $225 Rio-to-Lima marathon to a $24,000 guided expedition, the world's longest bus rides are a study in slow-travel misery.
#5289: Why World's Fairs Built Absurd Transit
Moving sidewalks, monorails, and robot boxers: what we lost when technology's grand public spectacles became trade shows.
#5271: 10 Transit Ideas That Never Left the Drawing Board
From the Hyperloop to the Sinclair C5, why do beautiful transit renderings never survive contact with the invoice?
#5193: Rethinking How We Travel Long Distances Without Flying
Sleeper trains, cargo ships, and vehicle relocation — the surprising alternatives to flying that already exist.
#4939: How Airports and Rail Become One Network
Why Schiphol, Frankfurt, and London TfL are gold standards—and where LAX and others fall apart.
#4719: When the Car Rewired Rural America
How the automobile replaced a dense patchwork of towns with a landscape built entirely around driving.
#4707: From Lawn Numbers to Billboards: Sign Law's Wild Spectrum
How a Connecticut town subsidizes house numbers, and what it takes to build a sign visible from a plane.
#4576: When a Society Starts to Creak
A listener asks: is Israel's bureaucracy breaking down, or is it just him? We dig into the science of prolonged national stress.
#4504: When Cars Took Over: Traffic Engineering's Origin Story
How 1920s traffic engineers borrowed from fluid dynamics, and whether AI routing could be a public utility.
#4483: Scooters vs Sidewalks: Jerusalem's Mobility Crisis
Why 3,000 scooter fines in Jerusalem couldn't fix a sidewalk safety crisis — and what actually works.
#4221: When a Train Becomes a Battlefield: Israel's Internal Crisis
Six hundred million shekels in damage. Two years delayed. The saboteurs aren't enemies — they're citizens.
#3327: Tel Aviv & Jerusalem: From Rival Cities to One Corridor
Two cities, 45 minutes apart, operating like separate planets. What global case studies teach us about real urban synergy.
#3274: Who Wins When Cars Leave the Street?
Removing cars doesn't create abundance—it creates a knife fight over eight meters of asphalt.
#3240: How to Design Cities for People, Not Cars
The thinkers and interventions reshaping urban streets — without banning cars.
#3193: Connected Villages: The Real Alternative to Suburban Sprawl
What if suburbs didn't require a car for everything? Exploring transit-first city planning that actually works.
#3144: When Walls Talk: Graffiti's 17,000-Year Story
From Pompeii to Melbourne 2025 — how cities decide what stays on walls and what gets scrubbed.
#3121: Can You Benchmark Government Value for Money?
A century of attempts to measure whether citizens get a good deal on taxes — and why none have fully worked.
#3086: How 2 Cities Banned Cars From Their Centers
Pontevedra and Ghent removed cars from their cores. Emergency response times actually got faster.
#3084: How Jerusalem’s Light Rail Broke Walking
Why a 90-minute walk for a package reveals everything broken about how cities manage construction.
#3029: Why Jerusalem's Light Rail Takes So Long
The visible pace of Jerusalem's light rail construction hides a complex web of incentives, archaeology, and municipal rules.
#3018: Designing a Trip to East Asia for Real Understanding
How to design an itinerary from Tel Aviv to Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan that produces genuine cultural understanding.
#3008: Israel's Rail Network: Ambition Meets Geography
Why Israel's "high-speed" train isn't high-speed, and what actually determines whether rail makes sense in a small country.
#2748: What Cities Look Like Without Cars
How Barcelona, Paris, and others are redesigning streets for people instead of vehicles — and what we can learn from them.