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Blair Lorenzo / The Fox and the City

@thefoxandthecity.com

1.7K followers 300 following 3.7K posts

The world-famous urban theorist who…wait, this has to be honest‽ Independent Professional Urbanist and Writer, creating in-depth critiques of urban spaces, places, & systems. My work: thefoxandthecity.com Also ED @etany.org She/her

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Blair Lorenzo / The Fox and the City @thefoxandthecity.com · Aug 25

For all the attention urbanism has gotten in recent years, urbanism as a field of study has often languished.

In my latest essay, I seek to define urbanism, explore what makes it different, and correct misconceptions about what it's not.

thefoxandthecity.com/articles/urb...

Urbanism as a Field of Study | The Fox and the City

For all the attention urbanism has gotten over recent years, the study of cities for their own sake has often languished—and might even risk being defined out of existence. With apologies to Louis Wir...

tinyurl.com

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Blair Lorenzo / The Fox and the City @thefoxandthecity.com · 1h

TFW LGA delays mean you miss your connecting flight by 5 minutes, and now you're stuck in YYZ for 6 1/2 hours.

Ah, the travelling life!

Blair Lorenzo / The Fox and the City @thefoxandthecity.com · 21h

👀🦊

New York Review of Architecture @nyreviewofarch.bsky.social · 22h

LETTERS and REPLIES from @ollywainwright.bsky.social, Shane Reiner Roth, Julian Rose, and @hawthorne.bsky.social

nyra.nyc/articles/typ...

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Blair Lorenzo / The Fox and the City @thefoxandthecity.com · 22h

There are dozens of us! I swear!

a man is talking to a group of people while standing in front of a tree .

ALT: a man is talking to a group of people while standing in front of a tree .

media.tenor.com

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Reposted by Blair Lorenzo / The Fox and the City

Regional Plan Association @rpa.org · 1d

Our socials person is busy playing Subway Builder for the rest of the day, please accept this post as filler until she's back online

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Blair Lorenzo / The Fox and the City @thefoxandthecity.com · 1d

My only regret: I wish I took the opportunity to be meaner to Eric Adams.

Blair Lorenzo / The Fox and the City @thefoxandthecity.com · 1d

I'm with the "wow."

Street lanes were always obviously a bad idea, but I always thought the line could be something with the K street extension.

Unfortunately, they never learned the real secret to PDX's streetcar success: low cost.

Mix that with dedicated lanes and we could've had something...

Shabazz Stuart @shabazzstuart.bsky.social · 1d

Wow. Just wow.

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/202...

Budget cut means D.C. Streetcar will shut down in March

D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) stripped funding for the doomed streetcar service from future budgets.

www.washingtonpost.com

Blair Lorenzo / The Fox and the City @thefoxandthecity.com · 1d

So, I just gave a random, anonymous "person on the street" interview about subway safety to a local news station.

Of all the people they could randomly grab passing by... 😅🦊

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Blair Lorenzo / The Fox and the City @thefoxandthecity.com · 1d

Go Westminster: if you can't pass a supply bill, there's another election or another government.

Blair Lorenzo / The Fox and the City @thefoxandthecity.com · 1d

Very good, in-depth dive into the cost explosions in Seattle.

Ryan Packer @typewriteralley.bsky.social · 1d

If you're still wondering how the hell we got to a staggering $30 billion price tag to build light rail to both West Seattle and Ballard, I've got you covered.
www.theurbanist.org/2025/10/10/h...

How Ballard and West Seattle Light Rail Became a $30 Billion Undertaking » The Urbanist

# Since voters approved West Seattle and Ballard Link in 2016, the two projects have been caught in a perfect storm of factors that led to the eye-popping cost estimates that we have today. While the ...

www.theurbanist.org

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Blair Lorenzo / The Fox and the City @thefoxandthecity.com · 1d

Philly is going to eat him alive. Poor guy.

Reposted by Blair Lorenzo / The Fox and the City

Ben K. @benjaminkabak.com · 2d

In the "most New Yorkers could not care less" vs "amount of energy spent" debate, the horse carriage thing is off the charts.

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Blair Lorenzo / The Fox and the City @thefoxandthecity.com · 2d

Had the same thought.

Blair Lorenzo / The Fox and the City @thefoxandthecity.com · 2d

One way I've been phrasing it is that transit is a service-driven industry.

You can't just linearly project ridership from an infrequent line; you have to provide service for people to consider using it. And once they do, the ridership starts to grow much faster.

Blair Lorenzo / The Fox and the City @thefoxandthecity.com · 2d

Really good interview from @davidzipper.bsky.social.

The keys? Frequency and transit-oriented development.

I would emphasize frequency. Running the bus every 30 minutes isn’t going to cut it if you want to grow ridership. With 30-minute service, if one bus doesn’t show up it’s now 60-minute service. Folks aren’t going to rely on that.

In Vancouver, we have lots of buses run with headways of five minutes or less. The SkyTrain is running every three or four minutes, and because it’s driverless, we have the capacity to run even more. That was extremely helpful when Taylor Swift completed her Eras Tour here last year, and we were able to empty out a 55,000-person stadium in 45 minutes because the SkyTrain came every 90 seconds.

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Blair Lorenzo / The Fox and the City @thefoxandthecity.com · 2d

Well, it was a close vote, but the folks in my office loved it!

The locomotives were indifferent.

(Also, Lectrofan for the win!)

Cluttered office backdrop sprinkled with three foxes and two locomotive plushes.

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Blair Lorenzo / The Fox and the City @thefoxandthecity.com · 2d

I'll have to give it a listen!

Also, that first link might have just added another trick tacking game to my list (something something two nickles about fox-based trick taking games). That heirarchy is spot on! 😉🦊

Next up was Fork, a very adorable trick-taking game where you simultaneously play cards in a trick, and, depending on the hierarchy of the animals, you may be able to win cards for scoring. The hierarchy order is is Foxes, Owls, Rabbits and Kale. On your turn, you pick a suit to be played, and then everyone plays their cards. The player who then played a fox can score an owl or rabbit. If an owl survives, it can score on a rabbit, and so forth. Any leftover kale also scores points if it doesn’t get eaten by the rabbit.

Fox card and box from a trick taking game called "Fork"

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Blair Lorenzo / The Fox and the City @thefoxandthecity.com · 2d

This is an amazing video! Worth a minute to watch it.

Shows the levels of technology at play, from an at the time brand new computer scheduling system through to interlockings controlled manually and ancient communication equipment.

The slow accretion of an old, complex system.

New York Transit Museum @nytransitmuseum.bsky.social · 2d

“Working the A Train” (1981) took a behind-the-scenes look at the #NYCsubway system and showcased the work involved in running the city’s longest train line. At one time, the film played in the gallery of the New York State Museum, accompanying the exhibit of its R9 subway car #1801.

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Blair Lorenzo / The Fox and the City @thefoxandthecity.com · 2d

Definitely an issue.

There's something here about the "parachute effect" and how it can both be good for induction (you see things that the accustomed might not!) and bad (too much novelty equals missing what's right in front of you).

I still stand by the advice, though.

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Blair Lorenzo / The Fox and the City @thefoxandthecity.com · 2d

This is how I learn about the fact that there's a board game about the Cross Bronx!?

www.gmtgames.com/p-953-cross-...

Better late than never, I suppose!

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Blair Lorenzo / The Fox and the City @thefoxandthecity.com · 2d

But seriously, my most consistent advice to to anyone studying any facet of urbanism is to get out there and, in the words of Jane Jacobs, pound the pavement. Nothing beats being on the ground.

And even if you can't be with what or where you're studying, cities provide the energy to keep going.

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Blair Lorenzo / The Fox and the City @thefoxandthecity.com · 2d

Ya gotta know the territory

Alexandra Lange @langealexandra.bsky.social · 2d

Reading about a famous landscape architect who camped out in a sleeping bag all over the site when he was working on the masterplan. Who is doing it like that now?

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Blair Lorenzo / The Fox and the City @thefoxandthecity.com · 2d

Print this and frame it on the wall with the title, "Why North American Transit Construction Costs are So High"

Ryan Packer @typewriteralley.bsky.social · 2d

I just can't get over the differences in scale between Ballard Link's Westlake Station as proposed and the original Westlake Station, off to the left.

Ballard Link's Westlake has two separate entrances underneath separate buildings, with one showing a long tunnel to get to the train guideway. They are at least five stories deeper than the original Westlake, which is tiny and only around 10-15% of the size

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Blair Lorenzo / The Fox and the City @thefoxandthecity.com · 2d

A fear: that maybe one day I move to Toronto, only to be constantly surrounded by film productions dressing it up to be New York.

Shawn Micallef @shawnmicallef.bsky.social · 2d

It’s nyc in the maybe 1940s in little Italy. Big shoot.

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Blair Lorenzo / The Fox and the City @thefoxandthecity.com · 2d

Sadly not surprising. Still a large disappointment; it's not normally how public art works in the subway.

At least the complex now has more stores in it than I've ever seen before. Finally feels almost useful and nice.

Blair Lorenzo / The Fox and the City @thefoxandthecity.com · 2d

Okay, I rescind some of my previous excitement.

I go out of my way only to later realize that it's only shown at the top of every hour for 2 minutes.

The other 58mins you get ads.

I know we have to pay for this $1.5B station, but that feels mighty chintzy in a city where we all have things to do.

Overlooking Fulton Center, the screens playing nothing but Snapchat ads.

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