Recommendations

• California YIMBY
  Meaning Yes in My Backyard and headed by M. Nolan Gray, a 501(c)(4) antidote to NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) that promotes more housing supply in the very expensive state of California—which is on track to lose electoral college votes after the next federal census, as is New York
• Strong Towns
  A 501(c)(3) that has successfully shifted the conversation in North America around mobility, transportation, and livable spaces while bringing together various groups of people (social justice advocates, environmentalists, health champions, and fiscal conservatives) and publishing articles, courses, and three podcast series in a group that grew out of a blog by Chuck Marohn of Minnesota, who also coined the word “stroad”
• Vision Zero Network
  A California-born 501(c)(3) with many chapters across the USA and that connects planners and community advocates under the banner of the not-so-radical idea to eradicate traffic violence

• Streetsblog
  Out of the original organization in New York City came Streetsblog USA, a 501(c)(3) that writes articles, produces deep dives through Streetsblog Projects, and connects the affiliated groups for Massachusetts, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and the whole of California as well as for Chicago, St. Louis, Texas, Ohio, and the Southeast.

• 99% Invisible
  An exploration of the hidden ways in which infrastructure etc. shape our lives and the world
• Active Towns
  John Simmerman’s interviews with many figures in the conversation on urbanism, the built environment, engineering, planning, and safety, as well as academic experts
• Philosophize This!
  Stephen West’s breakdowns of philosophers and writers—extremely valuable for you to go from “What the heck do you mean?” to “Right on!” or “No way!”
• Sold a Story
  The serialized investigation¹ that explored reductions in critical reading skills because of American schools’ love affair with a debunked alternative²
• Tech Won’t Save Us
  A series from Paris Marx, the investigative journalist who also a wrote timely and in-depth critical biography of Elon Musk right before Musk scrambled for complete political power
• The War on Cars
  The ironically named and “spicier” series of discussions with experts and activists with some special attention to New York City, hosted by Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon³

• About Here
  Reports from urban planner Uytae Lee of Vancouver, BC, on efforts to make our towns, schools, and communities better
• Alan the Fisher
  The political and national implications of transportation policy, bad politicians, and special attention to the US Northeast in a series from the straight-talking Philadelphian who’s got that brotherly love for trains
• CityNerd
  A video series on cities and transportation from the planner Ray Delahanty, who has bounced around the American West and puts Google Earth to great use in his national and global “top ten” lists
• Not Just Bikes
  Canadian-Netherlands immigrant Jason Slaughter’s series of videos that highlight the stark differences in layout between North American and Dutch cities¹
• Oh the Urbanity!
  Housing and transportation in North America are the focus of this video series from a duo (Jasmine and Patrick) living in Montreal, Canada²
• Shifter
  Reviews, video journals, and tips for using your bike for commuting in all conditions, from Tom Babin in Alberta, Canada
• Technology Connections
  Videos from Illinois’s Alec Watson on the interesting ways that technology intersects with our lives and the ingenious ways that people built machines before microchips—alongside a touch of science in order to warn us off scams

• Rovelo Creative
  A project by marketing guru Tom Flood of Ontario that makes the images, memes, and designs that catch your eye with slogans such as “We Can Either Design Out Our Kids or Design Out the Conflict” and “Bicycles Deliver the Freedom that Auto Ads Promise”
• Schneier on Security
  Bruce Schneier’s blog on operational security as well as tech news on crypto/cryptography—not the planet-incinerating Ponzi scheme known as crypto-currency
• Segregated by Design
  A documentary movie that draws from the book The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein as well as Ken Burns–style videos that show aerial views of the “before and after” for many places in the twentieth century in order to illustrate how “urban renewal” destroyed our cities
• Sheldon Brown’s Bicycle Technical Info
  The unequaled source for the mechanics of bikes, from gears and chain sizes to axles and dropouts (now archived after the passing of Sheldon Brown, a passionate biker and beloved member of his community), with excellent technical tables and how-tos—as well as a few guest essays from gatekeepers and so-called vehicular cyclists whose advocacy we should reject
• Shifter
  A blog and a series on YouTube from Calgary-based Tom Babin that explores practical cycling for daily life

• Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by M. Nolan Gray
• Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving by Peter Norton
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam
• City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America’s Highways by Megan Kimbal
• The Color of Law: A forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein
• Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town by Charles L. Marohn Jr.
• Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet by Ben Goldfarb
• Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
• The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape by James Howard Kunstler
• The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup
• Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Illusion that Science Underlies Our Transportation System by Wes Marshall
• Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen
• Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermayer
• Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment by Daniel Kahneman, Oliver Sibony, and Carl R. Sunstein
• The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro
• Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx
• Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck
• Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
• There Are No Accidents by Jessie Singer
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt
• When Driving Is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency by Anna Letitia Zivarts

Amazon.com, Inc., has upended the book-buying experience and engages in practices such as offering discounts on Independent Bookstore Day. It continues to overwork its drivers and warehouse workers to the detriment of our health as well as our roadways and bollards. It’s just what happens when you guarantee next-day delivery at a low cost.

It was not as much ingenuity as much as it was free-riding that helped Amazon to cut its costs. Without paying extra, Amazon’s trucks drive up and down the roads and streets. They create exponentially more damage from wear and tear, and they do so on the taxpayers’ dime. No, the money from the gas tax does not cover the costs of roadway maintenance. It doesn’t come close.

And then there’s the founder and executive chairman of Amazon, Jeff Bezos. Consider his personal stewardship of the Washington Post or his involvement in US national politics.

Please buy your books through other means. Pay attention to your local public library, which will have to regularly discard old stock. If you seek a certain book, but cannot find a new or used copy near you, take a look at Bookshop.org.

Also, as a temporary fix, a certain website links to PDF and EPub files of articles and books. The country code for the URL changes, but the main part of name consistently involves library, libation, or liberty and genesis, general, or gentry.

Nothing on this page is gospel. Different authors have different viewpoints that may clash. Sometimes, a single person can be a riddle.

Jane Jacobs, for example, is a complex figure. Although she did more harm than good and had great insights, her books are not manuals to follow religiously. Her body of work serves as the perfect example of the need for nuance.

Research backs the underlying mechanism behind Jacobs’s mantras. Sociologists have routinely found that we need to encourage those “eyes on the street.” The built environment plays a huge role in the incidence of violent crime.

Jacobs’s statements on cars were less wonderful. She opposed the suburbanization of downtowns and wrote as if the trends of suburbanization have happened even without cars. For her, it was as if the popularity of the car itself did not enable that trend. It was incidental that the resulting development single-mindedly catered to the automobile.

Also, the local control that she exhorted doesn’t fit the present very well. In the ’60s and ’70s, we needed grassroots opposition to governments that sought to flatten neighborhoods in order to build urban highways. In the twenty-first century, however, Jacobs’s argument has been co-opted by the owners of multi-million-dollar homes who paint themselves as the underdogs.

In practice, these homeowners just block all new housing. As the supply of housing dwindles and cannot meet the demand, rents and mortgages rise¹—along with the number of people who have to sleep in tents.

The bad-faith implementation of local control leads to the following complaint, which is not uncommon at meetings of local governments. “That derelict storehouse that has been empty for a decade and lies a quarter-mile from the train station? You want to take it and remodel it into a duplex for two families? No! You can’t do that! The aesthetics of townhouses and the kind of people that they attract will upset the ‘character of the neighborhood.’ ”

Daniel Kahneman is an especially frustrating figure. Even though he is a genius in many ways, his enthusiasm for certain technology lands wide of the mark. He and his co-authors in Noise praised the use of AI in job recruitment. For example, out of two hundred applications for a position, AI can whittle that number down to ten. If even seven of those came from applicants who will be worthy of a job offer, then AI has been a success for the company. AI eliminates unconscious bias and saves time. What’s not to love?

The use of computers in courtrooms has clear strengths. You don’t want to hand down variable sentence willy-nilly because of the judge’s mood on the day of sentencing for each convict.

In other areas, automation presents unique problems. AI bots can miss the nuances we need in order to know when an applicant does not want to grow with the organization. Your AI may cast a net that includes the best and brightest, but those people may reject the job offer. Or maybe they will quit one year into a multi-year, non-transferable fellowship.

The writers extol AI’s consistency, but it carries some consequences that the authors didn’t explore in the book. For recruitment, AI will filter out the same persons and promote the same persons in every search. Because no one can accept multiple offers at once or stay at every job, this system will end in disappointment for hopefuls and employers.
This problem goes beyond AI, however. Some professors who select PhD applicants or recruit new fellows fail to pick up on cues.

For example, consider a rock star scholar who gave a guest lecture to professors and graduate students at your university. (This is the de facto job interview at a research-focused university.) If the presenter responds to one person with “Oh, hm. . . . I’ll remember that at the next place.” It should be obvious that the presenter’s visit has merely been practice for the university where he actually wants to be.

It feels strange to write out the caveats. We shouldn’t have to qualify praise with “I don’t agree with everything you say, but . . . .” I would never say that my sister will be a great researcher in your laboratory but caution you that I don’t share her taste in movies.

No one can deny, however, that the current climate differs from the ideal. Some deem it to be a cardinal sin if you befriend an imperfect ally or politely listen to an ideological enemy. Hence, I will acknowledge that another author on this page, James Howard Kunstler, would later become a xenophobe and anti-vaxer.

I believe, however, that you should be able to talk with someone who disagrees on which oppressed group is most oppressed at the moment or how to fix the situation. I certainly think, for example, that you can read The Blind Watchmaker and not endorse Dawkins’s views on race (views that understandably upset people). That balancing act is still miles away from playing the role of useful idiot and going on television to glorify a dinner party at the White House.

The block-lists on Bluesky show how readily some people will excommunicate anyone who is related by one or two degrees to an allegedly bad person. It is eerily similar to how a conservative church censures the dutiful parishioner who has a gay family member.²

People’s need to purge anyone within reach prompted Daryl Davis to remark that some anti-racism advocates hate him more strongly than the KKK hates him. Can women feel as safe as Davis felt if they tried to do what he has done? No. Does his individualized approach go fast enough to change society? No. Should everyone copy him? Again, no. But Davis has made the world a better place and doesn’t deserve vitriol from people who should be on the same side.

We may have once thought that the witch hunt mentality had peaked in the 1950s, never to return, but since 2016 it has been the zeitgeist of the unending now.

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