Cars are bad for cities, they're bad in lots of ways that widespread AV adoption won't help and could actually make worse.

You can make that argument without insisting on things that really aren't true!

It's already faded here. Caught just the right window of time I think.

In fact, from time to time we had to disavow particular bad-faith uses of ST talking points.

On the whole, the ST rank-and-file leans very YIMBY. There's tremendous diversity of priorities among the advocate and small-donor base, though, and that's very much by design. (And IMO it's a strength.)

I worked there for years, and this is not it at all. The Strong Towns approach has many entry points, so there are definitely people with NIMBY inclinations re: development who are attracted to it for other reasons, but nothing about our advocacy or messaging ever sought to cater to those folks.

10/23/25 IG: mike_kelly_photography

10am ICE arrested US citizen after alleging she‘d made a threat. Both woman & onlookers refuted claim, but ICE proceeded to force her to ground & zip-tie her hands. Incident followed a failed attempt by ICE to gain access at nearby laundromat

🛑THIS MUST STOP🛑

I originally got "swarm" from Kevin Klinkenberg, but yeah, I like it because it evokes pollination (spreading replicable ideas / models) as well as emergent order from a bunch of individuals acting on their own.

And "horde" sounds like an invasion—probably not the image to lean into.

I will also add as an addendum here that I think the "time tax" argument is way less cut-and-dry with a bike, especially e-bike, than it is with transit.

I can drive my kid to preschool in 13 minutes (including a predictable rush-hour traffic jam) or bike him there in 17. The bike wins every time.

You can sell a lot of people on the vision of the kinds of great urban places that we can have *if* we build out transit-rich cities. Even suburbanites who don't want to take the bus to the grocery store can get on board with that.

Which makes the point: transit makes it *possible* to build certain kinds of great places that couldn't be great if they had to accommodate every visitor's car! Manhattan or the Chicago Loop would be impossible. So would a big college campus, or a downtown stadium surrounded by bars and restaurants!

Transit shines when it sucks to drive and park at your destination. Here in the Twin Cities I only really take transit to the airport, the U of M, or downtown. All places where I don't want to deal with parking.

All of Manhattan basically also falls into the "sucks to drive and park" category.

And of course you can multitask on the bus.

But I agree that many transit boosters are a bit dishonest about the quality-of-life case—in almost all US cities not named New York, transit is going to be a lot slower and less convenient than driving. It just is. We've built things that way.

At points in my life when I've been car-free, I found that deliberate-ness made my daily travel feel purposeful and accomplished, and often the journey became rewarding in itself or led to serendipitous discoveries I wouldn't have made. (Like a park or a restaurant in a less familiar part of town.)

It *is* an inconvenience to not drive. It's also less of one than drivers think. But you do have to be more thoughtful and deliberate about your travel. Thinking about when in the week it makes sense to hit up a given store because it's on the way to something else, for example.