Kyle Piira

Category: Blog

  • The Toll No One Charges but Everyone Pays

    When you drive on a busy road, you always pay a price. The real question is how you pay it, with money or with time.

    In most of the United States, we have chosen to charge drivers in time. There is no toll for entering a congested road, but during peak hours you might spend an hour commuting when the same trip would take 20 minutes with no traffic. Because there is no monetary cost, the time price people are willing to tolerate rises dramatically, and congestion becomes the norm.

    The problem with using time as the cost is that it creates bad incentives, especially around carpooling.

    Imagine two people traveling from the same neighborhood to the same restaurant across town. They could drive separately or share a car. If traffic makes the trip take an hour either way, there is no time savings from sharing. Each person still loses an hour. Given that, many people will choose separate cars so they can control their own music, podcasts, or comfort. Time-based pricing gives no reward for reducing the number of vehicles on the road.

    Now consider the same trip with congestion pricing. Suppose there is a $10 toll, and as a result traffic flows freely and the trip takes 20 minutes. If the two people drive separately, they pay $20 total. If they share one car, they pay $10 total, or just $5 per person. Suddenly, carpooling has a clear, direct benefit.

    That incentive scales. Larger groups are pushed toward higher-capacity vehicles like buses and trains, where the toll cost per person becomes almost negligible. A $10 toll split among 20 bus riders is just 50 cents each. At that point, the toll barely matters, especially if it is offset by fares.

    Once pooling becomes economically attractive, this also opens the door to entirely new transportation options. Private bus services, pooled taxi services, and on-demand shuttles become much more viable in a congestion-priced world. When the road cost is shared across many riders and travel times are predictable, these services can compete effectively with private cars while offering convenience and flexibility that traditional public transit may not always provide.

    This shift matters because traffic engineers should not be optimizing for the number of cars moved on a road. They should be optimizing for the number of people. Congestion pricing encourages fewer vehicles to carry more people, which reduces traffic and moves everyone faster.

    There are secondary benefits too. Revenue from congestion pricing can fund better public transportation, improving affordability and access. Wealthier drivers can still choose to pay higher tolls to use private cars during rush hour, as long as traffic keeps flowing and high-capacity vehicles are not stuck.

    In fact, if congestion pricing truly eliminates traffic, some dedicated bus lanes may become less necessary. Their primary purpose is to help buses avoid congestion. If congestion disappears for everyone, the system becomes simpler and more flexible, even on roads where bus lanes are not feasible.

    In short, you pay the cost of driving either way. Making that cost monetary instead of temporal creates far better incentives, rewards efficient behavior, and allows cities to move more people in less time.

  • Testing AR Glasses as a Treadmill Companion

    I’ve always found treadmill walking to be exceptionally boring. If I’m outside, on a park trail, a greenway, or any kind of walking path, I can walk for hours without thinking about it. The time just disappears. Put me on a treadmill indoors, staring forward at the same wall or the same row of machines, and suddenly even twenty minutes feels long.

    Right now, though, walking outside isn’t really an option. The weather is cold, the wind is unpleasant, and I am not motivated enough to bundle up just to be uncomfortable the entire time. So I’m stuck indoors with the treadmill, trying to find something that makes it feel less monotonous. That was the mindset I was in when I decided to try using my Xreal display glasses while walking.

    The idea was simple. If treadmill walking is boring because there is nothing to look at and no sense of movement through space, maybe I could fake that feeling. Not perfectly replicate walking outdoors, but at least add some variety and visual interest so it does not feel like I am just walking in place.

    I found that there is a whole category of YouTube videos that are just someone walking while filming. No narration, no edits, just long, continuous footage of moving through an environment. These videos are usually around an hour long, so during my walk I managed to get through two of them.

    The first was a nature walk along a waterfront, with mountains, waterfalls, and a bit of light hiking. The second was a fully CGI walk set in the Harry Potter universe, starting at the train station and ending at Hogwarts. That one could have easily felt cheesy, but it was actually surprisingly engaging while walking.

    What caught me off guard was how well the illusion worked. Making the virtual screen as large as possible turned out to be important. Even though the screen did not fit entirely in my field of view, I could move my head slightly to look at different parts of the scene, which made it feel less like watching a video and more like being present in the space.

    Audio, unfortunately, was where things fell apart a bit. Normally when I walk, I am listening to music or a podcast. With this setup, at least on iOS, that was not really possible. As far as I can tell, the system only allows one audio source at a time, so if you are playing a YouTube video, you cannot also play music in the background.

    I assumed I could just mute the video, but the YouTube app does not actually have a mute option. The only way to silence it is to turn the system volume all the way down, which also kills your music. I tried watching in the browser so I could mute the tab, but then I could not full-screen the video. So I had to choose between full screen with audio I did not want, or muted audio with a worse visual experience.

    It is frustrating, because the ideal setup would be to mute the walking video entirely and listen to a podcast while visually moving through these environments. Maybe Android handles this better. I honestly do not know. And maybe this kind of thing improves if Apple ever releases their own display glasses with tighter OS-level integration. For now, it is a real limitation.

    Even so, the walk was still more enjoyable than a normal treadmill session. Instead of music, I ended up listening to the ambient sounds from the videos. Footsteps, gravel, water, and background noise. It was not what I planned, but it turned out to be oddly calming, and the time passed much faster than usual.

    After I finished the walking videos, I tried watching an episode of Friends while still walking. That worked well too, but in a different way. For the walking videos, I wanted the screen to feel huge and immersive. For a TV show, a smaller screen was clearly better. Being able to see the entire frame at once matters more for traditionally shot content.

    I also experimented with display modes. For treadmill walking, anchor mode was clearly the right choice. With anchor mode, the video stays fixed in space, so you can look around within it. That made the walking videos feel much more natural, especially since my own movement lined up reasonably well with what I was seeing.

    Follow mode just felt off. Since the screen moves with your head, it is hard to focus on any one part of the image. As soon as you try to look at something off to the side, the whole display shifts. For this kind of use, anchor mode is not just better. It is basically required.

    Comfort and safety were things I paid close attention to. I did not feel motion sick at all, and I never felt unsteady. That is a big reason I would not try this with a fully immersive VR headset like a Quest 3 or Vision Pro. With the Xreal glasses, you still have a clear view of the real world, especially in your peripheral vision. You are never completely cut off from your surroundings, which makes walking on a treadmill feel much safer.

    There was one visual issue worth mentioning. During one of the walking videos, the scene moved indoors and became fairly dark. I was in a brightly lit gym, and in that situation I started noticing reflections in the display. Specifically, I could see reflections of my legs and feet moving below me. I think that is due to the angled nature of the display reflecting whatever is directly underneath it. As soon as the video returned to a brighter outdoor scene, the problem disappeared. Still, it is something to be aware of if you are watching dark content in a bright room.

    Overall, I would do this again without hesitation. I went into it just trying to make treadmill walking less miserable, and I ended up with something that genuinely made the experience more engaging. It did not replace walking outdoors, but it did a decent job of capturing some of that feeling. Movement, variety, and the sense that you are actually going somewhere instead of just counting down the minutes.

  • A Portable Screen That Mostly Gets Out of the Way

    I recently picked up a pair of Xreal 1S display glasses with one very specific goal in mind: something I could use on longer trips on planes, trains, and buses to watch movies and TV without hauling around a full VR headset or squinting at my phone.

    This is my first pair of display glasses, but I’ve spent time at both ends of the spectrum. I’ve owned full VR headsets like the Quest 2, Quest 3, and the Apple Vision Pro. Those give you a giant virtual screen, but they’re heavy, bulky, and not something you casually bring on a trip.

    At the other extreme are products like the Meta Ray-Bans. They’re basically normal glasses with a bit of tech sprinkled in. Convenient, yes. Useful for watching a movie on a plane, not really.

    The Xreal glasses sit in the narrow space between those two worlds. They don’t try to be a full immersive VR system, and they’re not just smart glasses with a few novelty features. They’re aimed squarely at one thing: acting like a portable, private screen you can actually use while you’re in transit.

    Apple markets the Vision Pro heavily as a movie-watching device, but I never enjoyed that experience. The headset is heavy, and I never stopped being aware that it was strapped to my face. That’s very different from normal glasses, where after a few minutes you mostly forget they’re there. On top of that, the Vision Pro is fragile, bulky, and impractical to travel with. Bringing it along just to watch something on a plane or train would take up most of my personal item space, and it never felt worth it.

    The Quest 3 has similar issues. It’s lighter and cheaper, so I worried less about damaging it, but it’s still awkward to travel with and not something I’d casually toss into a bag.

    That’s where I hoped the Xreal glasses would be different, and for the most part, they are. They’re small and light enough to fit easily into a backpack, or even a fanny pack if you really wanted to. That alone makes them far more realistic to bring on public transportation. They’re also light enough that they don’t feel like they’re dragging your face down after half an hour.

    Another thing I like is that they don’t have an onboard computer. Everything comes from my iPhone. That means one less device to charge or think about when I’m traveling. The glasses do drain my phone battery faster, but I already carry battery packs anyway. I have a MagSafe battery that snaps onto the back of my phone and charges it wirelessly, and I can still plug the glasses into the USB port at the same time. That setup works well enough that I didn’t need to buy anything extra.

    I do wish there were a wireless option. Having a cable plugged into the phone adds friction, especially when you’re shifting around in a seat. Being able to just AirPlay to the glasses would be ideal. I understand why it’s wired, since the phone is also powering the glasses, but it’s still something I notice.

    Because the glasses simply mirror my phone, every iOS app works. This turned out to be a bigger deal than I expected. On VR headsets, app support is always spotty. The Vision Pro still lacks official apps for major services like YouTube and Netflix, and on the Quest you often end up watching content through a browser. That’s fine at home, but it’s frustrating when you’re on a plane or train and want offline downloads to actually work.

    With the Xreal glasses, I just download content ahead of time using the native apps. Netflix, YouTube, whatever. It all works exactly the way it does on my phone, with no workarounds.

    One thing I really don’t like is that the iPhone screen has to stay on for the glasses to keep displaying content. Ideally, the phone would behave like it’s connected to an external monitor and let me turn the screen off. That would save battery and feel much cleaner. Because the screen has to stay on, I had to disable auto-lock while using the glasses. I hate doing that. Auto-lock is a basic security feature, and I’ve already had a few moments where I set my phone down, forgot about it, and came back later to find the screen still on.

    For now, I’m manually toggling auto-lock on and off when I use the glasses. It works, but it’s annoying, and it feels like something Apple should be able to improve eventually.

    The displays themselves are better than I expected. I’ve tried doing real work in VR before, and it never stuck. With the Vision Pro, the resolution was incredible and text looked perfect, but the headset was too heavy to wear comfortably for long stretches. With the Quest 3, I didn’t even get that far because the resolution wasn’t good enough for reading code. Text felt blurry and pixelated, and I gave up quickly.

    Out of curiosity, I tried working in the Xreal glasses on my laptop while sitting on the couch. I managed about two hours without much trouble and probably could have gone longer. The text isn’t as sharp as the Vision Pro, but it’s noticeably better than the Quest 3. Clear enough that I didn’t feel eye strain or frustration.

    That said, I’m not replacing my monitors. I still prefer a normal setup, and wearing what look like oversized sunglasses during a Zoom call would look ridiculous. But as an occasional option, it worked better than I expected.

    Where the glasses really shine is watching movies and TV. You don’t need extreme resolution for that, and I actually prefer keeping the virtual screen a bit smaller so nothing clips at the edges of the field of view. The field of view isn’t huge, but it’s large enough that it doesn’t bother me.

    The glasses have two display modes. One anchors the screen in space, and the other has it follow your head. For movies, I prefer the follow mode. For work, the anchored mode makes more sense, since you can look toward different parts of the screen without the whole thing shifting around.

    They also include a feature that converts content into 3D. I was excited to try it, but was underwhelmed. It’s fine, but not great. It tries to guess what should pop out of the screen, and the results are inconsistent. Sometimes it’s more distracting than immersive. I turned it off after a few minutes and haven’t really felt the urge to use it again.

    These are more comfortable than a VR headset, but they’re still not normal glasses. After a while, the nose pads start to bother me, and the top of the glasses gets warm. Not hot, just warm enough that you notice it. Little things like that add up and remind you that you’re wearing something on your face.

    I don’t think I’ll use these much at home. I originally thought they might be nice for lying on the couch when the TV angle is bad, but I don’t find them comfortable enough to choose over just holding a tablet or phone.

    Overall, for what I bought them for, watching movies and TV while traveling, I’m very happy with the Xreal 1S glasses. They hit a sweet spot that VR headsets miss by being small, light, and practical. I don’t expect to use them for much beyond travel, but for that specific niche, they work surprisingly well.

    One other use case I’m curious about, but haven’t tried yet, is wearing them on a treadmill or exercise bike to watch content more comfortably. That might be a future experiment. For now, they’ve earned a spot in my travel bag.

  • I’m Done With Bilt

    Bilt dropped details yesterday about their new credit cards. I’ve been using the original Bilt card for a little over a year, mostly for one very specific reason, and after reading through the announcement I’m pretty confident I won’t be switching to any of the new ones.

    I’ll probably just close the account at the end of the month and go back to paying rent directly out of my bank account.

    The original Bilt card worked because it did one thing unusually well. It let you pay rent with no fee and earn points on it. You got an account number and routing number, gave that to your landlord, and rent came out like it was a checking account. One point per dollar on rent. Simple.

    My rent is about $2,000 a month, so that came out to roughly 2,000 points every month. That’s not a ton of money, maybe $20 in value, but it was enough to matter in small ways. I mostly used the points for Lyft rides. Not flights, not aspirational travel redemptions, just “cool, this ride is free.” A couple of those a month was nice. It felt like getting something back for an expense that otherwise just disappears.

    There was a catch, though. You had to make at least five non-rent transactions per month to earn the rent points. And I never wanted to actually use the Bilt card for real spending. It wasn’t competitive with my other cards, and I didn’t feel like thinking about it.

    So I did what a lot of people probably did. I gamed it. I put five recurring charges on the card: iCloud storage for 99 cents, a few other subscriptions in the $5 to $10 range, and called it a day. Total monthly spend outside of rent was maybe $30. Rent was thousands. Points flowed.

    From Bilt’s perspective, I was almost certainly a terrible customer.

    Which is why none of this is surprising.

    The new cards are clearly designed to stop people from using the product the way I was using it. Under the new setup, if you want to earn points on rent, you need to spend a lot more elsewhere on the card. Roughly 75% of your rent amount, from what I can tell. If your rent is $2,000, you need to put about $1,500 of other spending on the card every month.

    That’s where it completely falls apart for me.

    I’m not interested in rerouting $1,500 a month away from cards I already like just to preserve a rent reward setup that used to be effortless. Five token transactions was annoying but manageable. Rebuilding my entire spending strategy around one card is not.

    And honestly, that’s fine. This feels very intentional. Bilt doesn’t want people who do the bare minimum, harvest rent points, and disappear. I was exactly that person. I don’t blame them for tightening things up.

    But it does mean I’m done.

    The new cards might be great for people who want a primary spending card and like the Bilt ecosystem. I’m not that person. I just wanted the rent thing to keep quietly working in the background, and it no longer does.

    So I’ll take the small loss and go back to paying rent the old-fashioned way. No points, no Lyft credits, no Wells Fargo relationship I didn’t really want in the first place. It was fun while it lasted.

    Adiós, viejo amigo.

  • Luxury Overnight Buses as an Alternative to Flying

    I recently came across an intercity bus service starting up in Europe that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. It’s an overnight bus, but not in the usual sense. Instead of upright seats and cramped legroom, the buses are built around fully lie-flat seats, similar to what you’d find in first class on a long-haul flight.

    Floor plan of a European luxury sleeper bus

    The idea is almost obvious once you hear it. Airlines already know how to make seats people can actually sleep in for eight or ten hours. So what happens if you take that same idea and put it on a bus, where the trip is slower but much cheaper to operate? At that point the comparison is no longer bus versus plane, but time versus comfort.

    If the entire trip happens while you’re asleep, the extra travel time matters a lot less. You board at night, go to sleep, and wake up somewhere else. There’s no early alarm, no airport security, and no sitting upright trying to doze for ninety uncomfortable minutes. In the best case, it barely feels like travel at all.

    Where this really starts to make sense is for trips that are just a bit too long to drive comfortably in one day. I live in Charlotte, North Carolina, and some of my family lives in Orlando. That drive is about eight hours on a good day. It’s long enough that you lose a full day to it, but short enough that flying can feel like overkill once you factor in the airport time.

    An overnight bus fits almost perfectly there. You leave Charlotte around 10 p.m., sleep through the night, and arrive in Orlando early the next morning. You didn’t spend the day driving, and you didn’t spend the night in a hotel. You just… arrived.

    That said, there’s one part of the European implementation that I think really works against the whole idea. Many of these routes include multiple intermediate stops. A single bus might start in one city, stop in several others along the way, and keep going past your destination.

    That sounds efficient on paper, but it creates a real problem for passengers. If you’re getting off at one of those intermediate cities, you may be forced to wake up at two or three in the morning. At that point the magic is gone. You’re tired, it’s dark, and there’s nowhere to go. Now you need a hotel anyway, which defeats one of the biggest advantages of the service.

    I think these routes should be strictly point to point. One bus per corridor. Charlotte to Orlando. Charlotte to Tampa. Charlotte to Miami. Airlines fill planes on these routes every single day. There’s no reason a well-designed overnight bus couldn’t fill up too.

    Going point to point also opens up something I think is crucial: treating the bus more like a hotel than a vehicle. Imagine arriving at your destination at 6 a.m. but not being forced off the bus immediately. Instead, your ticket includes a checkout time, maybe 9 or 10 a.m. If you want to get up and leave right away, you can. If you want to keep sleeping, you can do that too.

    That small change makes a huge difference. It turns the experience into transportation plus lodging, rather than just a long ride.

    Once you think about it that way, other details fall into place. Clean bathrooms are non-negotiable. Food should be available, even if it’s simple. A small breakfast option at the arrival depot would make mornings feel less rushed. Luggage handling could work the same way hotels do, with a claim system so people can leave when they’re ready instead of all at once.

    In theory, you could even plan trips where you string together several of these overnight routes and barely use hotels at all.

    This kind of service feels especially relevant in the United States. We used to have a far more extensive passenger rail network, but much of it is gone now, and recreating it at a national scale would take decades. What we do have is a massive interstate highway network that already connects most major cities.

    Intercity buses can take advantage of that immediately. The infrastructure is already there, and it’s effectively subsidized. For trips in the seven-to-ten-hour range, a comfortable overnight bus could easily compete with flying for a lot of people.

    Looking further ahead, this gets even more interesting when you consider autonomous driving. Long highway stretches are exactly where autonomy performs best. If the bus doesn’t need a human driver, that role could shift toward an onboard attendant instead. Someone whose job is to help passengers, keep things running smoothly, and generally make the experience better.

    That kind of staffing change could actually improve the service rather than cheapen it.

    This isn’t going to replace planes, and it’s not meant to. Nobody is taking an overnight bus from the East Coast to the West Coast. But for the many city pairs that sit in that awkward middle distance, this feels like a genuinely underexplored option.

    I would be surprised if something like this doesn’t eventually appear in the U.S. Once someone gets the execution right, it’s the kind of idea that feels obvious in hindsight.

  • Taxis still fall short

    I was recently in Miami, and like most trips I take in the U.S., my default plan for getting around was Uber or Lyft. I almost never take taxis anymore. It’s been many years since I last relied on one.

    But this time, I made an exception.

    I had just gotten off a cruise ship at the Miami cruise terminal. There was a clearly marked taxi stand right outside, with a line of cabs waiting. Our destination was a coffee shop in downtown Miami on 4th Street, no more than a five-minute drive. I could have called an Uber, but the taxis were already there, luggage in hand, no waiting. It seemed more convenient.

    I also had a bit of optimism going in. I’ve heard people say taxis have gotten better over the years. Some folks who strongly dislike Uber and Lyft will tell you taxis are fairer to drivers, better regulated, and generally less sketchy than they used to be 10 or 15 years ago. So I figured, fine, let’s give taxis another shot.

    That optimism didn’t last long.

    We got into the first cab in line, loaded our luggage, and told the driver where we were going. The moment he realized it was only a five-minute trip, his mood visibly shifted. He was clearly annoyed, borderline angry, that we weren’t going somewhere farther, like the airport.

    I get it. Longer trips pay more. But at the end of the day, taking fares is the job, and giving passengers attitude because the ride is short is just unprofessional.

    We got in the back seat and started driving. About halfway there, we stopped at a traffic light next to another taxi. Our driver rolled down his window. The other cab rolled down theirs. Then, right in front of us, our driver started complaining about us to the other driver, about how short the trip was and how ridiculous it was.

    We’re sitting right there in the back, listening to him complain about us like we weren’t even there. It was surreal.

    Then things got worse.

    As we approached 4th Street, our actual destination, the driver blew right past it. No turn. We kept going. 3rd Street. 2nd Street. 1st Street.

    Only then does he say, “Oh, you were going to 4th Street, weren’t you? Guess we’ll have to go around the block.”

    We looped all the way around, taking the long way back.

    I don’t believe for a second that he missed the turn by accident. I’m confident he did it intentionally to run up the meter. This is exactly the kind of behavior taxis have been infamous for forever, taking the long way, especially when you know the passengers are tourists.

    Eventually, we arrived.

    I asked how much it was.

    “Eighteen dollars.”

    For a five-minute drive. An Uber for the same trip would have been around $8.

    I asked if he took credit cards.

    “No. Credit card machine is broken.”

    At that point, I had basically hit every taxi cliché in one ride:

    • Driver gives attitude over a short trip
    • Complains about passengers while they’re in the car
    • Takes the long way to inflate the fare
    • Credit card machine “broken”

    We gave him a $20 bill, told him to keep the change, and left. The rest of the day was fine, but the experience stuck with me.

    What really struck me is how little taxis seem to have learned, even after more than a decade of competition from Uber and Lyft. This ride could have happened in 2006 and it would have felt exactly the same.

    The system feels fundamentally broken. Drivers are incentivized to behave badly, take longer routes, avoid short trips, and squeeze tourists for a few extra dollars. Because there’s no real accountability, the same behavior persists year after year.

    For all their faults, Uber and Lyft got one thing very right: incentives.

    Drivers aren’t paid more for taking longer routes, so there’s no reason to intentionally miss turns. If this had been an Uber, I’m confident the driver would have taken the most direct path, because dragging it out wouldn’t benefit them at all.

    So when people tell me, “Taxis are better now,” or “They’ve adapted,” I can only speak from experience. As of 2026, in Miami, they haven’t. They’re still just as scummy and unreliable as they’ve always been.

    Maybe in another 10 years they’ll finally figure it out.

    Or be replaced by Waymo.

  • Challenges in Defining True General Intelligence for AI

    I’ve been thinking about the concept of artificial general intelligence and, more broadly, what we even mean by general intelligence. There are many proposed tests meant to benchmark AI against this supposed gold standard, but I think there’s a fundamental problem with how these tests are framed.

    If we treat modern humans as the baseline for general intelligence, then any valid test of general intelligence should be passable by the vast majority of humans. If humans are generally intelligent, yet most humans fail a given test, that suggests the test itself is flawed rather than revealing a lack of intelligence.

    Here’s where it gets interesting. Humans today are not meaningfully different, biologically speaking, from humans 10,000 years ago. The human brain from that time is effectively identical to the modern human brain. If you took a newborn from 10,000 years ago and raised them in today’s world, there’s no reason to believe they couldn’t grow up, attend school, graduate from college, and work in any modern profession. Biologically, they would be indistinguishable from anyone else.

    If that’s true, then it follows logically that humans 10,000 years ago were also generally intelligent. And if they were generally intelligent, then any legitimate test of general intelligence should be something that the majority of humans from 10,000 years ago could have passed as well.

    This creates a serious challenge. How do you design a test that is passable by modern humans, yet also by humans from deep prehistory, people with the same cognitive capacity but radically different knowledge, culture, and environment? Most proposed AGI benchmarks don’t seem to meet this standard. Instead, they look like increasingly sophisticated versions of IQ tests or academic aptitude exams.

    That raises the question: are these tests actually measuring general intelligence, or are they measuring how closely an entity resembles what we consider a “smart modern human”? Those are not the same thing. General intelligence should be substrate- and culture-independent, but many current tests are tightly coupled to modern education, language, and abstract symbolic reasoning.

    You could even extend this argument beyond humans. Some non-human animals, octopuses for example, demonstrate remarkable problem-solving and adaptability. If they are, in some meaningful sense, generally intelligent, then a true test of general intelligence should at least plausibly accommodate them as well.

    Designing such a test is extremely difficult. But that difficulty itself suggests that many existing AGI benchmarks are misnamed. They may be measuring proficiency in modern human cognitive tasks, not general intelligence in the deeper, more fundamental sense.

  • Chicago should follow Seattle’s lead in re-connecting to it’s waterfront

    I spent the past weekend in Chicago, and really enjoyed it. I rode the L all over the city and made good use of the CTA buses, which honestly impressed me in their coverage. The trains mostly radiate outward from the Loop, so they’re not always ideal for cross-town travel, but the buses fill in those gaps really well.

    I did the classic tourist things: the architecture boat tour, some deep-dish pizza, and some museums. It was a fantastic trip. But one thing stuck with me long after I left the city: Lake Shore Drive.

    Chicago’s lakefront is stunning. There’s a long stretch of beaches and parkland along Lake Michigan that could be one of the greatest public amenities in the city. But instead of connecting the city to its shoreline, Chicago built an eight-lane highway through it.

    Lake Shore Drive

    Trying to walk from the downtown to the beach was surprisingly unpleasant. You head toward the lake expecting open access, only to hit a roaring wall of traffic. Lake Shore Drive is a barrier that you can hear and smell long before you reach the water.

    There are pedestrian bridges and underpasses, but neither makes the experience of getting to the beach very pleasant. The underpasses are dim and uninviting. The overpasses require climbing stairs while being surrounded by noise and exhaust. Some sections allow you to cross at street level, but those crossings feel unsafe and out of place. No one enjoys darting across eight lanes of traffic.

    This is public land that should bring people to the water, yet it’s dominated by cars. It’s a waste of beautiful real estate and a missed opportunity to create something extraordinary.

    Seattle’s redeveloped land where the Alaska way highway used to run

    It reminded me of Seattle, which used to have a similar problem. The Alaskan Way Viaduct once separated downtown from the waterfront, but the city finally removed it and replaced it with a surface boulevard. Now the area has bike lanes, wide sidewalks, a pedestrian plaza, playgrounds, and even a park that connects Pike Place Market to the waterfront. It’s inviting, vibrant, and alive. It shows what Chicago’s lakefront could be.

    I know it’s radical to suggest removing a major highway, but imagine what could be done if Lake Shore Drive were rethought entirely. What if it were buried underground, capped with a park, or replaced with a smaller road, perhaps just a transit corridor with bus lanes and bike paths? The buses that use it now could still run, but the space above could belong to people again.

    Right now, Lake Shore Drive is noisy and polluted, and it physically cuts the city off from one of its greatest treasures. It doesn’t have to stay that way. Seattle showed what’s possible when a city decides that access to its waterfront matters more than preserving a mid-century traffic pattern.

    Someday, I hope Chicago finds the political will to do the same. The city should tear down that barrier and reconnect its people to the lake. Residents deserve to enjoy their shoreline without having to cross a freeway to reach it.

  • I had to take an Uber to cross the street in Charlotte

    I was recently heading out to dinner with my girlfriend at a restaurant in one of Charlotte’s suburbs. Before I left, I checked the transit options and noticed there was an express bus that went straight from Uptown, near my apartment, to a stop only about half a mile from the restaurant. Perfect.

    The timing lined up almost exactly with our reservation. The bus would get me there about fifteen minutes early, which seemed like plenty of time to walk the short distance to the restaurant. It was only half a mile away, which should take no more than ten minutes on foot.

    At least, that’s what I thought.

    When I got off the bus, I opened the map and had a sudden realization: there was no way to cross the street. The “street,” as it turned out, was an eight-lane arterial road with traffic moving around fifty miles per hour. In other words, a classic American stroad.

    Looking at the map more closely, I saw that the nearest crosswalk was about one and a half miles away. So to reach the restaurant legally, I would have had to walk a mile and a half to that crosswalk, then another mile and a half back on the other side. And as if that weren’t absurd enough, the entire route lacked sidewalks.

    In total, that would have been a three-mile trip to cover what was, in a straight line, about two-hundred feet. Apple Maps estimated it would take an hour and seven minutes.

    This was not what I expected, and I definitely didn’t have an hour to spare. So I had two choices: jaywalk across an eight-lane stroad, or hail a ride.

    Jaywalking wasn’t an option. Between the speed of the cars and the lack of any safe refuge in the median, I would’ve been taking my life into my own hands. So I pulled up the app and ordered a car.

    Ten minutes later, a Lyft picked me up and drove me across the street. The ride cost five dollars.

    What should have been a five-minute walk became a fifteen-minute ordeal that cost money and produced emissions. And by forcing me to summon a car to do something as simple as crossing the street, the design of the area made traffic worse for everyone else too. For the Lyft driver to reach me, he had to drive along the same congested, rush-hour road, adding one more car to an already overloaded system. After picking me up, he drove me across the street, dropped me off, and then merged back into that same stream of traffic, slowing down all the other drivers just a little more because there was no safe way to walk.

    This isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s an example of how poor street design isolates transit riders and pedestrians while making traffic worse for motorists. The city provided a bus that went right to where people might want to go, but the surrounding infrastructure made it functionally useless.

    If Charlotte wants to be a city where people can move around without a car, it needs to do more than run buses. It needs to connect those buses to sidewalks, crosswalks, and safe, human-scaled streets.

    Because no one should ever have to pay five dollars and wait ten minutes just to cross the street.

    My Lyft crossing the street

  • Rethinking Fault: Are City Planners to Blame for Car Crashes?

    We like to think of car crashes as the fault of individual drivers. Someone was distracted, drunk, careless, or reckless. But I don’t think that’s the full story. I think the real blame belongs to the people who designed the cities that make driving the only option in the first place.

    City planners and traffic engineers know that not everyone is good at driving. They know that some people have medical conditions, slower reflexes, or just aren’t equipped to operate heavy machinery safely. They know this, and yet they’ve built entire societies around the assumption that everyone can and must drive a car.

    So when someone who’s not a great driver gets into a car and causes an accident, who is really at fault? Is it the person who made a mistake, or the people who designed a city where that person had no choice but to drive?

    If you’ve created a system where the only way to get to work, school, or the grocery store is to operate a two-ton machine at highway speeds, knowing full well that not everyone can do that safely, then you are responsible for what happens next. You can’t act surprised when the predictable becomes reality.

    Even “safe” roads in America are not truly safe. Engineers brag about wide lanes, big medians, guardrails, and bright signage. They call it “forgiving design.” But you can’t “forgive” the fact that every trip still requires people to pilot deadly machinery at lethal speeds.

    Every hour of every day, someone dies in a car crash. And we call them “accidents,” as if they were random or unavoidable. But they’re not random. They’re built into the design. The engineers who made these roads could tell you exactly how many people will die on them each year. They run those models. They know the numbers. And they build them anyway.

    Drunk driving is the perfect example of how our urban design fails us. Nobody is saying people should drink and drive. But when it’s common, that’s a symptom of terrible planning.

    If someone wants to have a few drinks, they should be able to do that without risking their life or anyone else’s. In most American cities, that’s not possible. You drive to the bar because there’s no other option. You can’t walk because there’s no sidewalk. You can’t take a bus because it either doesn’t exist or stops running early in the evening. You could take an Uber, but that’s expensive. So people rationalize. “I’ve only had one or two. I’ll be fine.”

    And here’s the kicker: cities require bars to have parking lots. They literally make it illegal to open a bar without providing a place for people to park their cars. They are mandating a system that encourages drinking and driving. Then they turn around and lecture us not to do it. It’s absurd.

    Meanwhile, in Europe, you can walk to a bar. You can take a tram home. You can go out, drink, and get home safely. The safe option is also the convenient one. In America, the safe option barely exists.

    Here, if you don’t want to drive, you’re out of luck. You either pay for expensive rideshares or risk walking along a strode with no sidewalk. So people drive, even when they shouldn’t. And when something goes wrong, we blame them.

    But the truth is, most of these “bad drivers” are just doing what the system forces them to do. They’re acting rationally inside a setup that makes the rational thing dangerous.

    Traffic engineers like to say they’re just following orders. “The city told us to widen the road, so we widened it.” But that’s not good enough. If someone told them to build a bridge they knew would collapse, would they do it? Would they sign off on something they knew would get people killed?

    Of course not. Yet they do it all the time with roads. They sign off on stroads that they know will lead to hundreds of deaths a year. They approve designs that make walking, biking, and transit impossible. They don’t want to kill anyone, but they don’t care enough to stop. And that indifference is deadly.

    When someone dies in a car crash, we talk about personal responsibility. But we almost never talk about the people who built the environment that made that crash inevitable.

    Drivers might hold the steering wheel, but it’s the planners and engineers who paved the road, set the speed limits, banned mixed-use zoning, and made driving mandatory. The blood isn’t only on the drivers’ hands. It’s on the people who built a system that forces everyone to do something dangerous just to live their lives.

    If we actually want to stop the death and destruction, that’s where we need to start looking.