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mmautner

@maxmautner.com
350 followers 433 following 1.7K posts

🌇 🚶🏽‍♀️🚲🛴🚌🚅 Market urbanist, enjoyer of nature & bicycles. 👉 Long-form takes at maxmautner.com

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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 3h
"Pardon me while I murder your Tactiq AI Extension"
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 30/09/2026
“It doesn't apply to single-family homes.” California is a joke, merciless mocking commence!
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 29/09/2026
As I was writing this blogpost, I was thinking about how drastically I am underestimating the average American's experience with traffic violence--I knew several dead by the time I was 18: maxmautner.com/2026/09/28/w...
maxmautner.com
When we talk about traffic violence
By 40, ~79% of Americans have lost someone they know to a crash. Most would trade faster driving for safer streets if someone asked them.
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 28/09/2026
If you come at Mill Valley you best not miss the excellent sandwiches at the Mill Valley Depot
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 26/09/2026
As a father who runs with my baby son, I am surprised how often I get words of encouragement from strangers for doing so. Family-friendly communities begin and end with whether we systematically prioritize safely moving around outside of a car: www.ipr.northwestern.edu/news/2017/ne...
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 26/09/2026
LA has the fewest road miles per capita among US cities—so why do they suck? Even in a dense urban metro the cost of induced demand outstrips funding: maxmautner.com/2026/09/25/r...
maxmautner.com
Too many roads
Kansas City has three times as much road per resident as Los Angeles, and a third as many people paying for each mile.
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 25/09/2026
A car-free happy hour in San Carlos, CA! Thank you to the county for the Transit Month proclamation!
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 25/09/2026
Thank you for publishing me, @seamlessbayareaca.bsky.social ! www.seamlessbayarea.org/blog/2026/9/...
seamlessbayarea.org
A stop sign for $1,000 — Seamless Bay Area
Over the course of several months I had captured 3 photographs of crash aftermath at a single intersection, encountered while biking to and from downtown San Mateo. A few months later, a hit-and-run d...
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The Basin @thebasinla.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
basin.la/articles/nin...
basin.la
LA Metro has some of the slowest escalators on earth… Why?
LA Metro’s escalators go 90 feet per minute, slower than nearly everything we found.
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The Basin @thebasinla.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
It's not your imagination, LA Metro's escalators are some of the slowest on earth. We measured it against 139 other cities.
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Ian @woolie.meowmeow.city · 23/09/2026
Congratulations to the "set it on fire" crowd for dramatically increasing construction costs for affordable housing developers. Type I concrete for six stories! sfyimby.com/2026/09/cons...
According to comments by Tipping Structural, the project will be entirely concrete Type I Construction, after a “detailed comparison of life-cycle structural system costs incorporated recent and dramatic increases in insurance costs for wood-framed construction in Oakland.”
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 23/09/2026
Some family transiting
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 23/09/2026
Some SF transit corridors
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 23/09/2026
Rock & roll, Razor
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Erik Noonan @eriknoonan.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Cities should be paying people to bike. Cities should be buying people e-bikes. Cities should be rewarding people for convincing neighbors to ride bikes. Every trip by bike is a net financial gain socially. And it compounds, the more people who do it.
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zafarali.me @zafarali.me · 23/09/2026
"there were over a dozen similar requests" Quick builds and traffic calming are popular folks and you can request your city do them too! maxmautner.com/2026/09/17/s... @maxmautner.com
maxmautner.com
A stop sign for $1,000
3 crashes at one intersection, photographed on my way to work. The all-way stop went in 178 days after I sent the city a notice of dangerous condition.
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 21/09/2026
I am a “YIMBY” because I want someone down the block from me who knows how to unclog my toilet instead of someone driving 2 hrs each way working for a private equity-owned plumbing conglomerate. If that means they live in a multistory apartment building I can see from my window that is okay.
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Ben Raderstorf @raders.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
This year legislators introduced a slate of 17 bills intended to close California’s “license to kill” system of loopholes for dangerous driving and repeat offenders. Almost all of them failed: calmatters.org/tag/license-... @calmatters.org
calmatters.org
License to Kill
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 20/09/2026
I’ve had a lot of interesting experiences riding public transit but one memory: chatting on Caltrain with a Brazilian-American ex-ICE agent telling me about why he quit
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 20/09/2026
Counterterror and safe streets policies converge on hostile vehicle mitigation. Anti-ram bollards and raised planters are the same hardware urbanists want for sidewalk protection, funded from a much larger budget line.
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 18/09/2026
The story: maxmautner.com/2026/09/17/s...
maxmautner.com
A stop sign for $1,000
3 crashes at one intersection, photographed on my way to work. The all-way stop went in 178 days after I sent the city a notice of dangerous condition.
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 18/09/2026
New stop-sign-in-the-neighborhood celebration cake:
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 17/09/2026
I enjoyed the Raygun documentary
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 16/09/2026
Don’t ask, don’t tell
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 15/09/2026
A Murphy toilet! 🤯
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Brendon @premiumsocks.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
To add to this, knees are a use-’em-or-lose-’em kind of body part. If you want good knees in old age, you should walk/jog/run regularly starting by your mid-30s, prompting your body to strengthen your knees in response to the wear. Walking 35 minutes twice a day would be perfect for this.
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 14/09/2026
The mind cannot conceive of walking a cumulative one hour a weekday, you will get injured?
A lot of folks here start preaching health. If it is 35 mins walking one way, you are essentially walking an hour everyday. Easy for folks to think they can do it, not when you are 5 days a week to office year after year, and your job comes first in everything. You'll start to feel that on your knees soon.

Otoh, if you can manage a bike as someone said, it is doable.
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 13/09/2026
They get it:
Barrin92: "is that accurate? Here in Germany minimal Kfz-Haftpflichtversicherung is I believe 7 million in personal injuries and 1 million in property damages. So if a broke guy in the US runs you over and causes you half a million in health damages, puts you out of work and totals your car you'll get 30k from their insurance? How can you legally let people on the road like this"
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 12/09/2026
Mandatory insurance minimums were quickly invented in the 1920s—papering over a massive hole in driving costs: unpaid debts to victims of crashes maxmautner.com/2026/09/11/l...
maxmautner.com
Killing someone with a car costs $1.6 million. California requires drivers to carry $30,000
NHTSA puts the average economic cost of a traffic fatality at $1.6 million. California requires a driver to carry $30,000 in bodily injury coverage, and everyone who was not in the crash pays the rest...
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 12/09/2026
Nice
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 11/09/2026
The average American in 2025 paid $0.77/mile to drive a car--which is right about the same amount in damages that the public bears for that same mile driven accounting for crashes, pollution and wasted land-use: maxmautner.com/2026/09/10/p...
maxmautner.com
Paying for driving
Drivers in the US pay about half of what their driving costs. The rest comes to $2.15 trillion a year.
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 10/09/2026
Taiwan flag, San Francisco flag, Crocs, "WALK YOUR BIKE"
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 10/09/2026
You have to respect the game LLM companies play with customers in "rate-limiting" compute budget on research tasks.
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 08/09/2026
Hot take: bicycle frames should come with rear racks welded on
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 07/09/2026
Peter, I’m blocked from replying to you—I’m happy to chat with you about this in a different forum!
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Sam @samd.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
it’s because people like you oppose transit oriented development peak Berkeley is a “climate scientist” who prefers parking to bike lanes and fights against building more housing near transit, all while crying crocodile tears that not enough people take transit
To:
Subject:
Friday, April 15, 2022 4:53 PM
All Council
North Berkeley Bart
WARNING: This is not a City of Berkeley email. Do not click links or attachments unless you trust the sender and know the content is safe.
I write to formally OPPOSE the Planning Commission's proposal for a 12 story building at the North Berkeley BART station, in contrast to the staff recommendation of 7 stories, maximum.
A 12 story building will ruin the sense of the neighborhood, lack appropriate affordable housing, and limit the ability to use non-profit/affordable developers.
Reject the Planning Commission's 12 story proposal.
Peter Gleick
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Upzone the coastal elites @aboutdave.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Another reason is local advocacy against the density near transit necessary to sustain transit. Btw, density also enables higher levels of affordability.
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 06/09/2026
Angel Island is basically Capri
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 06/09/2026
So many cargo bikes at this morning's Burlingame downtown farmers market. Aventon, Specialized, Rad, Urban Arrow
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Patrick Siegman @siegman.biz · 26/08/2026
There's often little daylight between Trump's transportation chief, who works to block transit, bike, & pedestrian projects, and SF's own Connie Chan. "Chan was a leading critic of the city’s 2022 decision to permanently ban cars on a key stretch of Golden Gate Park’s John F. Kennedy Drive." 🎁link:
sfchronicle.com
Connie Chan’s critics call her a roadblock. She calls herself a voice for her S.F. community
Supervisor Connie Chan has often positioned herself as a tireless community advocate who tries to protect vulnerable residents from harm. Her critics say she’s an obstructionist.
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Mike Eliason @holz-bau.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
boomer ecology really is 'a single family house with PVs and heat pumps and two eSUVs in every driveway'
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 06/09/2026
Car-brained Americans make parenthood a prison for parents and children: reason.com/2026/09/02/v...
reason.com
Virginia mom gets 6-month suspended jail sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond
The government also placed Karyann Parkinson on its child abuse and neglect registry, where she will remain for seven years.
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 06/09/2026
Importantly, mail-in ballots largely eliminate the car owner turn-out bias that existed with mandatory polling location voting: maxwellpalmer.com/docs/article...
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 06/09/2026
You are simply not asked to bail out car infrastructure, or told what your bill is.
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Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈 @maxdubler.com · 04/09/2026
The California Environmental Quality Act is bad for the environment because it gives litigious busybodies the power to delay and block environmentally friendly projects like bike lanes on the grounds that the government has not sufficiently analyzed the bike lanes’ “environmental impacts.”
sfchronicle.com
A Berkeley bike lane would eliminate 145 parking spaces. Residents are suing to stop it.
Plaintiffs argue that Berkeley City Council approved the Hopkins Street bike lane project without conducing necessary environmental reviews.
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 06/09/2026
Ready to try this!
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Aaron Blackshear @aaronblackshear.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
Just not this time, where I live. Somewhere else. Not by me.
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Urban Land Rent 🇸🇴🚰 @urbanlandrent.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Moments like this reveal public policy is in fact its own specific kind of subject matter expertise. Being a climate scientist does not mean you know very much about the public policy initiatives that can curb emissions.
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The Overhead Wire @theoverheadwire.com · 06/09/2026
So Robert Reich is a NIMBY and Peter is car brained.
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mmautner @maxmautner.com · 04/09/2026
It has been a full 4 years since I recorded my last podcast episode, and I'm happy to share that I've revived the dead website and the content is still evergreen(!): theaccidentalengineer.com
theaccidentalengineer.com
The Accidental Engineer
Career advice for those starting their software engineering careers. We conduct interviews of experts who have been there, making the same career decisions that you are!
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