Kirsten Bladh
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kerstanley.bsky.social
Kirsten Bladh
@kerstanley.bsky.social
1.1K followers 1K following 760 posts
Policy @ Open New York. She/her. Cargo bike mom. Bassist for Leggy in my former life. NYC via LA via Cincinnati. Left urbanist 🚆
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kerstanley.bsky.social
All of the pink areas are lots with nothing but a single-family home (and probably the world's best access to transit, jobs, and greenspace).
November 25, 2025 at 5:24 PM
kerstanley.bsky.social
November 20, 2025 at 5:47 PM
kerstanley.bsky.social
Sometimes this tendency is even applied to unequivocally good things, like new subway trains!

It's not possible that the government is doing something for the good of the public, it must be that someone is getting rich off of a government contract.
A tweet from user 'Talia Jane' about new subway cars in New York City, which reads: "i want my tax dollars to be spent on shit that makes sense. cutting seating & replacing it with a bunch of cameras & limited areas to hold onto while a fart from the first car travels all the way to the end doesn't make any damn sense except to the donors who won the contract."
November 14, 2025 at 4:38 PM
kerstanley.bsky.social
My home state has essentially zero regulations of home schooling, despite the serious potential for child abuse. I have a friend who was homeschooled purely because his parents feared he was gay, so they wanted to have complete control over him. He never learned how to formally write.
Ohio parents who homeschool their children, ages 6 to 18, must notify their local school superintendent with the student’s name and contact information and an assurance that certain subjects will be taught, except where in conflict with religious beliefs. With the passage of House Bill 33 in 2023, the state no longer requires parents to provide annual student assessment, though it does still require annual notification. This bill also removed instructor education requirements, as well as requirements for a minimum number of hours of instruction or for parents to maintain records. Homeschool students are required to receive instruction in certain subject areas.
November 14, 2025 at 4:07 PM
kerstanley.bsky.social
The "no enforcement, only design" people love to point to the street design of places like Japan, ignoring that Japan also has a robust and stringent traffic enforcement system to which researchers have attributed the country's low traffic death rate.
Excerpt from a research paper on traffic fatalities in Japan that reads: "One measure that has played a significant role in reducing accidents is the enforcement of traffic violations. This shows that in 1970, the year with the worst fatalities, 5,309,000 cases of enforcement were reported; however, in 1984, the number of cases of enforcement increased to 13,735,000, a significant increase that contributed to halving the number of traffic fatalities. Subsequently, as the number of enforcement actions gradually decreased to 8,846,000 in 1992, the number of accidental fatalities began to increase again and a second traffic war ensued. Since then, the number of enforcement actions has fluctuated between increases and decreases, gradually declining since 2005, whereas the number of traffic fatalities has continued to decrease, partly because of efficient enforcement actions."
November 14, 2025 at 3:38 PM
kerstanley.bsky.social
The average car-owner in NYC has an income 2x as high as the average non-car-owner. The number of poor vehicle owners in this city is very very small.
November 14, 2025 at 12:50 PM
kerstanley.bsky.social
Volume in what sense? Auto loan debt currently exceeds credit card debt, according to the fed.
November 13, 2025 at 7:02 PM
kerstanley.bsky.social
"Relative to pre-pandemic norms, only the West is seeing slower sales"

www.realtor.com/research/oct...
November 7, 2025 at 3:27 PM
kerstanley.bsky.social
Updated numbers. I actually can’t find a precinct with a better margin for Mamdani.
November 5, 2025 at 3:33 AM
kerstanley.bsky.social
This is my precinct, where easily 95% of the population lives in brand-new market rate apartment buildings, i.e. “luxury housing.”
November 5, 2025 at 2:43 AM
kerstanley.bsky.social
And he’s not even the only one to say this!
October 28, 2025 at 9:29 PM
kerstanley.bsky.social
The follow-up is somehow even worse
October 22, 2025 at 4:36 PM
kerstanley.bsky.social
LA uses both cameras and humans, but the cameras are doing much better.
Screenshot of an article about Los Angeles' use cameras to enforce bus lanes that reads: "In the second half of March, the program gave out 3,093 citations over cars blocking bus lanes or stops. That number more than doubled in the first two weeks of April, when 6,681 citations were issued. Before the cameras were installed, officers typically issued around 570 tickets for impeding bus lanes monthly, the transportation department told LAist."
October 20, 2025 at 2:09 PM
kerstanley.bsky.social
Chat, is it cringe lib to organize people via a specified time?

(Posted by a friend on ig)
Instagram story post of a tweet that reads “I didn’t know the No Kings protests required registration and had start and end times. What are y’all doing? LOLOL”
October 19, 2025 at 4:27 PM
kerstanley.bsky.social
Injuries FROM WHAT
October 17, 2025 at 11:51 AM
kerstanley.bsky.social
People who say this sort of thing are either disingenuous or just unaware that modern cars have more surveillance tech than even smart phones and collect 5x as much data, which car companies are very willing to share with police.

A speed camera merely takes a picture of your license plate.
The cars we drive say a lot about us, but they see even more. Modern cars collect a huge amount of data, stored indefinitely onboard and in the cloud.The data tracks not just the car, but its occupants: it records our location history, phone contents (contacts, emails, texts, tweets, social media feeds), voice recordings, weight, and other biometric data. If this sounds creepily expansive, it is. Car data often is collected for the benefit of manufacturers, not drivers. Our information fuels a billion-dollar industry for subscription services as well as selling drivers’ data to third parties, including law enforcement. Many cars on the road feed this industry: 84 million connected cars beamed data to manufacturers and other companies in the U.S. in 2021. Drivers can refuse some data collection, but saying “no” often comes at the cost of passenger safety: no data, no emergency roadside service or built-in navigation tools. For law enforcement, cars provide a rich and easily accessed source of surveillance data. Disturbingly, while cars collect much more detailed data than our cellphones, they receive fewer legal and technological protections, making them vulnerable to suspicionless searches. For instance, while the leading phone operating systems offer relatively robust cybersecurity features, most cars do not.The overbroad automobile exception to the Fourth Amendment may allow law enforcement to search a car without a warrant. A parallel Fourth Amendment exception for third-party data suggests that once cars beam information to an automaker or insurer, drivers lose what few privacy protections they had. Federal statutes provide few additional protections, and just a few states have enacted middling measures to protect car data. As a result, law enforcement agencies can co-opt car data to explore the most vulnerable details of our lives, exposing protestors, people seeking reproductive healthcare or a safe home to police harassment or prosecution.
October 15, 2025 at 2:48 PM
kerstanley.bsky.social
wtaf reading this gave me anxiety for these people.
Screen from the article that reads, "Upward of 40 percent of Americans now pay for basic items like groceries and health care using borrowed money — and this excludes credit cards. A third of younger Americans hold their savings on nonbank tech platforms like Venmo, and industries from retail to transportation derive anywhere from 14 percent to half of their profits from partnerships with credit card companies."
October 10, 2025 at 8:41 PM
kerstanley.bsky.social
That used to be the case with Clermont County re:275 but there are brand-new suburban sprawl subdivisions popping up all the way out to Mt.Orab and incomes are on par with the rest of the Cincinnati MSA suburbs.
October 8, 2025 at 6:45 PM
kerstanley.bsky.social
Sadly, this child poverty map is close to a proxy for Appalachia, and likewise indicates that Clermont and Warren counties are now middle class suburbs.
October 8, 2025 at 2:37 PM
kerstanley.bsky.social
DOT website says they're doing this to avoid work in colder months
October 6, 2025 at 8:17 PM
kerstanley.bsky.social
Every part of the city outside of the red zone still has parking requirements. Upper Manhattan! Most of Brooklyn! The entirety of the Bronx!
October 2, 2025 at 7:08 PM
kerstanley.bsky.social
A student from my alma mater faces criminal charges for documenting a protest for the local paper, i.e. for being a journalist. Professors are publicly defending him, but the university has been silent.

And, I'm no lawyer, but this seems like egregiously unethical behavior by the prosector.
Excerpt from a news article that reads, "At a press conference on the day of the arrests, Covington police chief Brian Valenti alleged that Fening did not have press credentials or an ID on her when she was taken into custody. Later that month, Kenton County prosecutor Rob Sanders told the local station WLWT that he viewed the defendants’ status as reporters as irrelevant. “We’ll be evaluating it like we would any other civilian, no matter what their line of work or what profession they are engaged in. It doesn’t matter to us when we evaluate the evidence,” Sanders said. More recently, the chief prosecutor for the office now handling the case told CJR that they had offered to drop the charges if the reporters would say on the record that the police had probable cause to arrest them, but the reporters declined. (The Kentucky ACLU, which is representing both reporters in the case, said it could not comment on that claim.)"
October 2, 2025 at 3:30 PM
kerstanley.bsky.social
This has been my concern with the Palisades fire, in particular. Some of the richest and most powerful NIMBYs on earth can now claim legitimate victimhood, which they are weaponizing broadly.
October 2, 2025 at 2:26 PM
kerstanley.bsky.social
Even if for no other reason than to prevent Spencer fucking Pratt from dictating state policy, please call (916) 445-2841 and urge Newsom to sign SB 79.
Screenshot of an article in the New York Times with a headline that reads, "Reality TV’s Bad Boyfriend Is Angry Again. This Time, He’s Yelling at Gavin Newsom. After losing his house in the Palisades fire, Spencer Pratt has gone from the archetype of celebrity emptiness to community activist — and become a magnet for Republican politicians." Following the headline is a picture of Spencer Pratt standing in the Pacific Palisades. Excerpt from the article that reads: "For anyone with even the barest familiarity with Speidi content — their staged paparazzi shots, maybe, or Montag’s claim to have once had 10 plastic surgeries in a single day — this episode was quite the twist. The subject was zoning policy, and their guest was state senate candidate Nico Ruderman. The California legislature had been debating a bill called SB 79 that would allow apartment buildings as high as nine stories in neighborhoods within a half-mile of major transit stops, like a light rail or bus rapid transit station, regardless of local zoning rules. The legislation wouldn’t apply to the Palisades, which does not have such a stop, but for weeks Pratt had suggested on social media that it would. This in turn had prompted the bill’s author, Scott Wiener, the Democratic state senator from San Francisco, to accuse him of spreading a “bald faced lie.”"
October 2, 2025 at 2:24 PM
kerstanley.bsky.social
This has been my concern about the Palisades fire, in particular. Some of the richest NIMBYs on earth can now claim legitimate victimhood, which they are weaponizing broadly.
An excerpt from the New York Times reads: He has the credibility of a real fire victim, though, and his following can’t be ignored: 1.1 million followers on Instagram and 2.2 million on TikTok. This year, a number of bills in the state legislature have been shelved or amended in response to critiques (some of them inaccurate) that Pratt pushed on social media. Nobody would attribute this to him alone, but in an era when influencers outshine local media, to many, he has become the voice of the Palisades.
October 2, 2025 at 2:17 PM