William Skudlarek
William Skudlarek
@willskud.bsky.social
47 followers 360 following 38 posts
Building codes, housing, transit, former (recovering?) CPA from Chicago
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surely they can't be this dense? Did they see the committee hearing last week where their staff was grilled?
"On the Amtrak route between Washington, D.C., and New York City, the highest-trafficked stretch of train track in the country, there are no grade crossings. The last one was eliminated in the 1980s.

There are 331 grade crossings along the Brightline route in South Florida."
A ‘Death Train’ Is Haunting South Florida
The Brightline has been hailed as the future of high-speed rail in the United States, but it has one big, unignorable problem.
www.theatlantic.com
I counted five different permutations of "single", "exit", "stairwell", and "stairway" used in the article, including "single stairwell exits". No mention of "single-stair" though
Have you gotten any interest from policymakers/transit officials?
I feel like it had a nice ending here, but I've heard/seen too many companies ruined by PE to feel too confident in this. Even if you are correct, what value is PE adding to society?
This reminds me of something I found in my research that I wanted to ask you about. Is what they are referring to in this screenshot single stack or is it something else?
Seeing some of the other replies you are getting, maybe you should do a poll?
Sq. miles. I doubt most Americans (myself included) know what an acre means in practice, but are more familiar with what a mile means.
This is the most important quote of the article for me. With the recent reduction in the funding gap, I was hoping this was a possibility as I don't want the governance reforms watered-down just to get to 60% if we don't need it to take effect right away. Glad to hear that is under consideration.
Not only do you not know which cars will open, but on UP-N at least drivers are inconsistent with where they stop the train on the platform. At morning rush at the beginning of Ravenswood platform, sometimes you would be near the last car and sometimes it was the engine. Really grinds my gears.
Do you know if they will post a recording of it at some point?
super-secret industry lobby group who tried to keep code groups separate
Eventually industry turned on the UBC too though
Not a book unfortunately! It's from the first of a series of articles in a vintage home magazine. Starts on pg 64 here: www.usmodernist.org/HH/HH-1964-0...
www.usmodernist.org
third-party code cost/benefit analysis = "Reviewer 2"?
Lots of examples of tribalism in early building code history
this was pre-PVC right? were most countries using cast iron or copper at that point?
Chicago (only city left that does this AFAIK) still requires lead and oakum joints in taller buildings
previewing @pipedreaming.bsky.social's next report? should include Chicago requiring lead and oakum joints in the year of our lord 2025 in many buildings
Maybe! but 2010 SCOTUS did strike down the mandatory Medicaid expansion b/c they saw conditioning Medicaid funding to states on it was coercive.
Authors reason that much of the hostility to innovation culture in building code spaces are at least partially due to the fact the building code positions don’t attract fresh blood into the profession. Stagnant talent pool fosters groupthink.
Even with multiple model codes, there did not appear to much competitive pressure between them. The code groups looked more like a cartel, each had its own agreed-upon territory.
This is still quite true even 50 years later. Even with the consolidation of four model codes into just one. Only two states (CA and MD) fully adopt the IRC section requiring sprinklers in all single family homes.