Why your bus bunches.
Two buses arrive together, then none for twenty minutes.
ISSUES 001—212 · EST. 2022
The archive.
Field notes on what makes a city move—and who gets to decide. Start anywhere; the ride makes sense from here.
All the way back, one Tuesday at a time
Year
2026 · Fall dispatches
The quiet genius of the timed transfer.
How Swiss towns make every train meet every bus.
What Bogotá got right.
TransMilenio, twenty-five years on.
The case against the free fare.
A closer look at what zero-cost transit can—and cannot—fix.
Stop spacing is a political decision.
Every extra block is a trade-off between access and speed.
Inside a bus network redesign, line by line.Sunday
A Sunday deep dive into the maps, meetings and hard choices behind a new network.
Why the 2 a.m. train matters more than the 8 a.m. one.
Night service is where a network proves it's real.
Paint, posts and the five-week bike lane.
How quick-build streets beat the ten-year plan.
The real cost of a station elevator.Sunday
Where the $40 million actually goes.
2025 · Dispatches
Frequency is freedom, revisited.
Why "every 10 minutes" changes how people live.
The bus stop nobody wanted to move.
A small consolidation and a very long public meeting.
Reading a transit budget, line by line.Sunday
Operating, capital, and the gap between them.
In praise of the boring transfer station.
Good connections should feel like nothing happened.
2024 · Dispatches
What Paris learned from closing a road.
The Seine riverbanks, a decade on.
Why ridership counts are always wrong.
And why planners use them anyway.
The streetcar that should have been a bus.Sunday
A cautionary tale in three funding cycles.
2023 · Dispatches
Ten rules for a better bus map.
Straight lines, honest frequencies, no spaghetti.
Who rides at 5 a.m.
The first trips of the day, and the people who need them.
The fare cap, explained.
Paying less for riding more, and who pays for it.
2022 · Dispatches
Ghost buses and the trust gap.
What happens when real-time arrivals lie.
Why I left planning to write about it.
Eleven years in, and the meetings I can't forget.
Notes from the 7:42.
The first issue, and the bus that started it.