Sandy Johnston
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sandypsj.bsky.social
Sandy Johnston
@sandypsj.bsky.social
3.5K followers 730 following 1.9K posts
Transit geek. Planner. Cat dad. Cubs fan. Deputy Director of Regional Transit Planning at MBTA. Blogging much less than I'd like at www.itineranturbanist.wordpress.com.

Opinions my own.
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sandypsj.bsky.social
This is a phenomenal example of how people advocating for the "character of the neighborhood" are often actually advocating to *change* the character to be less dense and more suburban. Which, if you go play with the city's n'hood GIS explorer, is what has happened all over Boston!
Nearby residents who opposed the proposal cited all the variances the proposal needed - for number of floors, lot width, overall building size and lack of parking on a lot zoned for a two-family house - and its locationon a narrow street with a sharp curve and frequently full parking spaces as proof the new building would prove a menace that would only further drive longtime residents away. Arlene Simon, who lives down the street, said there's a reason the property has been vacant for more than five decades - it's just too small to allow construction that would not infringe on the privacy of surrounding homes. But also, its location right at a dogleg turn on Alpha would make it impossible to allow construction vehicles to linger on the block safely. Plus, once construction was done, "parking on the street is impossible as it stands," she said, adding the street already has constant problems with people parking in front of hydrants.
November 25, 2025 at 5:34 PM
Reposted by Sandy Johnston
bikepedantic.bsky.social
Everything wrong with everything housing in a nutshell:

“Nearby residents who opposed the proposal cited all the variances the proposal needed…” to build housing identical to that surrounding it
universalhub.com Universal Hub @universalhub.com · 12h
Zoning board approves a new triple decker, in Dorchester
www.universalhub.com/2025/zoning-...
#Boston #housing
Rendering of new triple decker, unit sizes, comparison to neighboring triple deckers
November 25, 2025 at 5:03 PM
Reposted by Sandy Johnston
townsusa.bsky.social
Decatur, Illinois
Pop: 87,236

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decatur,_Illinois

Images: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=107913948
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=107905604
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=107913357
picture of Decatur, Illinois picture of Decatur, Illinois picture of Decatur, Illinois picture of Decatur, Illinois
November 25, 2025 at 12:21 PM
sandypsj.bsky.social
New CT railcars look nice (though the seats look narrow), and kudos to CT for buying what looks like a relatively off-the-shelf Euro product with state $$, but it's pretty funny to see these marketed as "European-style" when they're not MUs.
www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/local/s...
See inside CTRail's new multi-million dollar European-style rail cars
New train cars on CTRail’s Hartford line are one step closer. On Monday, the Connecticut Department of Transportation showed off prototypes for what will eventually be 60 new rail cars, rolling out in...
www.nbcconnecticut.com
November 25, 2025 at 2:24 PM
sandypsj.bsky.social
Beware the beached floof whale, the tummy is trap
Beebe, an extremely large long hair cat with brown and black fur, is stretched out on a green and blue striped carpet, with his stomach showing and his tail splayed out.
November 25, 2025 at 2:39 AM
sandypsj.bsky.social
Experimenting with using some cork roadbed I had laying around to level out between Unitrack in the yard and reduce the amount of scenery mortar I need to use. Note the wide variety of small objects holding down the cork while the glue dries.
November 25, 2025 at 1:48 AM
sandypsj.bsky.social
Answer: no
November 25, 2025 at 1:25 AM
sandypsj.bsky.social
Is SEPTA buying the EMUs just retired from the Deux-Montagnes line?
www.phillyvoice.com/septa-region...
SEPTA to fully restore Regional Rail service by late December with $220 million boost from PennDOT
The funding also allows the transit authority to improve its trolley infrastructure, upgrade escalators at 13 stations and complete other capital projects.
www.phillyvoice.com
November 25, 2025 at 12:50 AM
sandypsj.bsky.social
Knowing things about trains in Iowa means realizing how much coal mining used to go on there, even though it's not what the state is known for (map from Rail Guide)
November 24, 2025 at 11:54 PM
sandypsj.bsky.social
The names on the Mamdani transition teams in housing and transportation are...impressive?
November 24, 2025 at 7:57 PM
sandypsj.bsky.social
Fascinating! This accords with my prior that the people most likely to experience mobility isolation are living in big-lot SFHs in suburbia or rural areas--but beware of findings that reinforce priors :-). Looking forward to reading the paper.
angelamli.bsky.social Angela Li @angelamli.bsky.social · 1d
👉 Our new paper uses daily mobility data to show that spatial isolation is much more common today among those living in advantaged neighborhoods than the converse.

👩🏻‍💻 Lots of massive data wrangling and careful assumptions about mobility data needed - but check it out here! doi.org/10.1177/0042...
Abstract for "The truly isolated: Spatial isolation of advantage in the United States" by Shannon Rieger, Angela Li, and Patrick Sharkey, published at Urban Studies
November 24, 2025 at 6:27 PM
Reposted by Sandy Johnston
leebey1.bsky.social
Walter Payton uses a paper transfer to ride public transit on the 1979 RTA commercial.
November 24, 2025 at 12:31 PM
sandypsj.bsky.social
The idea that Schenectady is the hardest place name to pronounce in New York is objectively false. It's basically spelled phonetically! Valatie or Skaneateles, though...
secretnyc.co/hardest-town...
The “Hardest Town to Pronounce” In New York Has Been Named — And It’s Also Known As “The Electric City”
Schenectady, NY is officially the state's biggest tongue-twister, and we teach you how to say it + how to visit from NYC.
secretnyc.co
November 24, 2025 at 1:52 PM
Reposted by Sandy Johnston
benrosstransit.bsky.social
"After nearly a decade as an attorney representing community associations, I entered city government as a zoning believer. I quickly lost my faith."
From the outgoing director of Baltimore's zoning appeals board.
www.baltimorebrew.com/2025/11/24/b...
Baltimore’s former zoning board director explains why she lost faith in zoning | Baltimore Brew
The mayor’s “Housing Options and Opportunity” legislation – including Bill 25-0066 – will go a long way toward fixing an unfair system, she says. [OP-ED]
www.baltimorebrew.com
November 24, 2025 at 1:20 PM
Reposted by Sandy Johnston
sadbusdriver.bsky.social
I think this is mostly San Francisco finally shrugging off the pandemic, but it is *really* funny that rent prices in San Francisco shot up *immediately* after the city banned RealPage and other algorithmic price setting software.

My pre trends are incredible!
November 22, 2025 at 5:29 PM
Reposted by Sandy Johnston
kaptrice.bsky.social
For decades, China's only electrified suburban railway was a 300km-system in Fushun, an industrial city of a little over a million in Liaoning province. I wrote a little about it: kaptrice.blogspot.com/2025/11/the-...
The Fushun Electric Railway - China's First Electric Railway
China is not a country well-known for legacy suburban railways. Although lately several dozen new-build lines have appeared, and several mai...
kaptrice.blogspot.com
November 18, 2025 at 8:21 PM
Reposted by Sandy Johnston
byerussell.com
Brightline October numbers are out, a significant jump following the rollout of a new schedule.

Oct ’25: 260,370, up 20% y/y
Sept. '25: 227,851
Aug: 252,425
July: 255,472
June: 254,627
May: 256,633
April: 243,285
March: 280,003
Feb: 247,083
Jan: 266,346
Dec '24: 264,201
Nov: 246,563
Oct: 217,735
November 21, 2025 at 6:39 PM
sandypsj.bsky.social
I've had zero to do with it other than watching as an Orange Line rider, but rapid implementation of dropbacks on the OL is one of the coolest things I've seen in my time at the MBTA. From a process improvement exploration project to full-bore implementation in just a few months.
November 21, 2025 at 1:21 PM
Reposted by Sandy Johnston
davidzipper.bsky.social
Good news: Congress is poised to prevent Trump from ending federal transit support.

"Asked whether he wanted to eliminate the mass transit account, [House Transportation Chair] Graves responded, 'No...it's been there for 40 years, and I want this to be a bipartisan bill...I'm just not interested."
November 20, 2025 at 1:53 PM
Reposted by Sandy Johnston
josephpolitano.bsky.social
The US continues to lose manufacturing jobs—payrolls are down 94k over the last year, & another 6k jobs were lost in September

Transportation (especially auto manufacturing) and electronics/electrical manufacturing are the biggest losers, but almost no subsectors are doing well
A graph of manufacturing employment year-on-year growth
November 20, 2025 at 1:37 PM
sandypsj.bsky.social
I actually think the salient point about residential choices is that a huge part of the way Americans have gotten used to dealing with cost tradeoffs is by externalizing them on others or society as a whole, and that's what the suburbs specialize in offering
November 19, 2025 at 4:09 PM
sandypsj.bsky.social
Cab ride video from an adorable narrow-gauge Swiss interurban/tram/S-Bahn line? Yes please. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wohlen%...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfUk...
www.youtube.com
November 19, 2025 at 3:36 AM
sandypsj.bsky.social
First experiment with using some kind of paste or mortar to do layout scenery. This is Busch "scenery mortar," colored with some acrylic craft paint. Picked up for cheap; it'll also get a top coat and some ballast/yard cinders on top
November 19, 2025 at 1:07 AM
Reposted by Sandy Johnston
starlinechicago.bsky.social
Developers openly talking about adding “aggressively priced product farther out from the employment core” – as explicit of an admission as any of a traffic time bomb – while we continue to allow NIMBYs to routinely derail any notable amount of transit-oriented apartments in the name of “congestion”
November 18, 2025 at 1:15 PM
Reposted by Sandy Johnston
starlinechicago.bsky.social
Hard to see this as anything other than a regional policy failure. If the only place in the six-county region where first-time homebuyers can afford to buy a home is outside the six-county region, we aren’t adding enough supply in the urban (or suburban) core. www.chicagobusiness.com/residential-...
The two biggest builders here, Florida-based Lennar and Texas-based D.R. Horton, both have higher-priced developments closer to the inner rings of the metro area, he said, but have "balanced that with more aggressively priced product farther out from the employment core, and they've benefitted from it." Factors include the relatively permissive building climate in outlying suburbs compared to older, more built-out places. But the biggest driver is fast-rising prices for existing homes, which erases their preferred-pricing status for first-time buyers. "For the first time in modern housing market history, U.S. single-family new construction, in aggregate, is no longer selling at a premium to existing homes," ResiClub's Lance Lambert reported Nov. 13. Nationwide, the median sale price of new single-family homes in August was 0.2% below the median for existing homes, an all-time low, according to Lambert. "That's a dramatic shift from January 2013," he wrote, "when the typical new home sold for 38.4% more than a comparable existing home, marking the highest premium ever recorded." The supply of existing homes on the market is epochally low, which leads to higher sale prices. Builders can't respond overnight with new supply because they need to acquire land, get municipal approvals and install utilities and roads. But some builders spotted the shift early and are on the case.
November 18, 2025 at 1:10 PM