Jake's blog

NC3D on Flickr, cc-by-nd The California High Speed Rail Authority put out its 2026 business plan, which shows some pretty aggressive savings in the full line construction - $2 billion reduction for the initial Merced-Bakersfield segment, $10 billion reduction for the San Francisco-Gilroy segment, and huge cost reductions in Southern California by upgrading the existing Palmdale-Los Angeles commuter rail line instead of carving a new right of way. While the Merced-Bakersfield savings are accrued through better project management, the big savings between San Francisco and Gilroy are done by reducing the maximum speed from 220 MPH to 110 MPH.  The same...

This is going to be a bit of a change from my usual urban posting. I want to talk about my trip back to visit my grandmother's tiny Kansas hometown, and why it's a bad idea to romanticize living in rural America. I've seen a lot of posts bouncing around the Internet talking about how people can should move to rural America, where land is cheap, cost of living is low, and so on.  This post on Twitter is one of the species.  You see this a lot, where influencers push young people struggling to make it in a major...

There's been a lot of progress to fix California's housing crisis, because the State Legislature has finally decided to fix things.  Credit where credit is due.  There's going to be two parts to this post. The first part will be a summary of what the Legislature has done to fix things; the second will be what the legislature needs to get done.  You'll note that there's not a whole lot of local reforms in here. Some city councils have acted in good faith to do their part, like Sacramento, Oakland and Berkeley. But most, like LA, SF and San Jose,...

A group of tech billionaires has quietly bought up 78 square miles of Solano County, California, halfway between San Francisco, where I grew up, and Sacramento, where I used to work. The funders are a who's who of the tech industry, including Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn; Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape and venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz; and Laurene Powell Jobs, the Apple founder's widow.   They want to build a new city of 400,000 people there, i.e., about the size of Oakland. It's called California Forever. The group released their city plans to the public a couple weeks...

I've been asked by a good number of people on Bluesky and elsewhere for my voting endorsements. I've collected my voting recommendations here.   CANDIDATES NYC Mayor: Zohran Mamdani.  I was publicly skeptical of him in the primary, and I'm still not crazy about a lot of his ideas. But he's the best option in the field because he's correctly identified what NYC's problems are, and he's surrounded himself with competent people.  The alternatives are far worse.  Andrew Cuomo ran the subways into the ground when he was governor.  Curtis Sliwa is an incoherent crank, even though some of his ideas...