Stephen Jacob Smith

He was struck and badly injured by a car driver. But his injuries weren't sufficient to trigger a real police investigation. And therein lies the problem. buff.ly/zdzqJtS

TIL that DC shortens the exit separation distance from one-third of the diagonal of a sprinklered building to one-quarter the diagonal

Literally a Sunrise Movement cofounder: “Lawrence has criticized [Michigan’s solar preemption law] — he said in a radio appearance that wind and solar critics have ‘some good points’ and that the state solar preemption has allowed utilities to ‘build mega projects without community buy-in.’”

It’s the market saying it wants you to repeal the Height Act

Like, in Montreal, we have three sets of lights per intersection for local streets in the lowest traffic urban environment, but zero adaptive signal management. Traffic lights for the Stone Age.

My obsession with traffic signals' overdesign stems from the fact that they are relatively simple objects, and the bloat in their size and specs that burdens our built environment is particularly easy to see. Also, a symbol of the "quantity-over-quality" approach to design typical of NA engineering

Depicted: Traffic signals' poles in Magog (QC), Utrecht (NL), Helsinki (FI), and Stockholm (SE). In case you're still wondering why traffic signals have become so expensive to build in Québec.

In other words: this should be a legal place to put a modern electric elevator

Tomorrow's the day for me and @stephenjacobsmith.com talking about single-stair and the future of design review in DC. Tickets are getting scarce.

I was so excited to ride the new Acela, until I got to my assigned seat and realized it is mostly windowless, and the person who controls the window is gradually lowering it :-(

TWU be like “Hochul is MAGA because she doesn’t support our MAGA union” in reality, they’re just mad at Hochul because she refused to expand the union’s expensive handouts and make-work jobs funded with taxpayer $$

It's a new Stone Age in London, with stone apartment buildings and a stone demonstrator exhibit showing how it's done. Because it is silly to grind up limestone, cook it, and then add water to turn it into... stone. We could be doing a lot more of this in Canada- we are made of rock.

Real egress overkill in Taiwan – two stairs, one with a vestibule and the other inside an elevator lobby, despite only having 17 floors (single-stair height in China and much of Europe) and being made entirely of concrete with a balcony for nearly every *room*? www.archdaily.com/1187401/dunh...

The MTA’s primary union is spending a ton of money to try and swing the vote against Hochul (the most pro-transit governor in generations) When Hochul wins by double digits anyway, I hope she remembers this and plays hardball with the union on efficiency improvements like OPTO and automating IBX

Late October in NYC and I’m still seeing mosquitos every day…I can’t believe we have the technology to kill these fuckers and we’re letting them roam free.

B2 Arch proposes a rental single stair building at ~3 FAR. Lots of 2 and 3 br units. All corner units. Quite dense at ~2.9FSR (vs our 1.6 FSR prototypes)… I’m hearing that ~2.8 fsr is where rental pencils at the moment. Glad to see a project moving ahead. dailyhive.com/vancouver/21...

Currently, the fourplex and the stacked triplex are under the IBC, and the rest are under the IRC. If the draft proposal that has momentum at the ICC passes, this specific fourplex will move into the IRC but the triplex will remain in the IBC because it has more than two stacked units.

- On Thurs Oct 29 @ 1pm ET/10am PT, - @willskud.bsky.social of CBNA will present a code change proposal ... - to the ICC's G13 "middle housing" committee's Fire working group. It will increase the allowable size of exterior windows on residential buildings, which is important for dense urban lots.

I watched a Grand Designs episode with a modular house to replace a rotting cottage; 1/3 of the episode was about verifying no bats were nesting in the old roof

The major objections were both that it would threaten UNESCO status (infill argument) and that it could harm the bats (greenfield argument). These seem contradictory and like they could be used to kill literally anything?? Site is here by the way: www.bbc.com/news/article...

Free transit activists love to claim that most (or all) of LA Metro's fare revenue is canceled out by collection costs. It's not true.

Who has access? Which buildings’ waste is intended to be left here?