Kurt Raschke
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kurtraschke.com
Kurt Raschke
@kurtraschke.com
they/them

Transit and technology, mostly. Prone to ranting.

Reposts and favorites are not endorsements. Posts are solely my own.

ABATE NOXIOUS STIMULI.
These contraptions have no place on any road, anywhere, least of all on city streets.

But it is the HEIGHT OF HYPOCRISY for a company whose goal is to "limit our impact on the communities we touch" to commission these monstrosities to roam around for a daft, insipid ad campaign.
December 5, 2025 at 6:03 PM
Excuse me, some of us call it "the emulation layer".

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/03/w...
Everyone Uses This Coping Strategy. When Does It Become a Problem?
www.nytimes.com
December 4, 2025 at 10:16 PM
Remind me why we can't just pedestrianize Lower Manhattan?
Hey, Columbia Sportswear, if you really care about the outdoors, if you really care about people, maybe you can explain how clogging New York City’s streets with two diesel exhaust-belching rolling billboards for a MARKETING CAMPAIGN aligns with your ESG goals?
December 4, 2025 at 5:30 PM
Hey, Columbia Sportswear, if you really care about the outdoors, if you really care about people, maybe you can explain how clogging New York City’s streets with two diesel exhaust-belching rolling billboards for a MARKETING CAMPAIGN aligns with your ESG goals?
December 4, 2025 at 2:00 PM
Reposted by Kurt Raschke
A robot is only an OTA away from a behavior change, good, bad, or weird.

Waymo robots have always violated some traffic laws. For >year they have been getting noticeably more aggressive as I've shown in a variety of videos. Apparently, on purpose per Ludwick who's been on this project for 15 years.
“They’re bending traffic laws, getting impatient with pedestrians and embracing the idea that when it comes to city driving, politeness doesn’t pay… Waymo has been trying to make its cars “confidently assertive,” says Chris Ludwick, a senior director of product management with Waymo”
Self-driving Waymo cars are suddenly driving way mo like “an aggressive, New York taxi driver.”
www.wsj.com/lifestyle/ca...
December 3, 2025 at 6:08 AM
In case, like me, you were wondering what on Earth UMTA was up to…
December 1, 2025 at 10:22 PM
I really want to see proper FDIR capabilities in consumer devices. You can’t push packets through a cellular link despite adequate signal strength? Power-cycle the modem _automatically_, and if that doesn’t fix it before reaching some pre-determined lockout, then _annunciate a fault_!
November 30, 2025 at 1:51 AM
I'm working on a new Web site. There's a dev server running on my laptop, which is connected to public Wi-Fi, and I want to see it on my phone, which is on 5G. This should feel like magic, like some kind of networking sorcery, but thanks to @tailscale.com it all just works.
November 29, 2025 at 9:03 PM
"Hey, should I buy this 16 TB drive that's on sale today?"

No. It's almost certainly a liability. Let me explain.

If you're just looking for somewhere to stash a third, or fourth, or fifth copy of some cold data, sure, maybe.
November 27, 2025 at 10:14 PM
As a former Federal civil servant, this whole thread is just heartbreaking. I urge you to read it in full.
Being among the first interrogated and ultimately fired by DOGE, I certainly felt we were facing the business end of a right-wing conspiracy theory 🧵
DOGE was not a money-saving effort. It was an effort to chase down and prove right-wing conspiracy theories. They went after USAID to prove conspiracy theories about foreign aid. Then they went after SSA to, again, pursue conspiracy theories about Dems paying "illegals" to vote. 1/2
November 27, 2025 at 9:08 PM
Sometimes it’s tough to work in transit, but stories like this make it all worth it.
November 24, 2025 at 2:23 AM
Reposted by Kurt Raschke
no one has ever spoken like this about a GoA4 (grade-of-automation four, or no staff on-board and completely automatic) driverless metro
November 20, 2025 at 1:06 AM
I think I’ve mentioned this before but a fun little data science project for someone would be to build a map of places where you can see the stars at night and which are transit-accessible.
November 21, 2025 at 9:45 PM
Reposted by Kurt Raschke
On this Trans Day of Remembrance, we remember the bright and courageous trans people whose lives were stolen by hatred. Their absence is felt across our city.

We will honor them by building a New York where every trans person can live safely, fully and freely.
November 20, 2025 at 4:57 PM
(as regards the last repost, there is an increasing view among consultants and operators that GoA 3/4 systems simply _must_ have PSDs, and that doesn’t have to be the case! SkyTrain and the DLR have functioned just fine for decades!)
November 19, 2025 at 11:58 AM
Reposted by Kurt Raschke
I understand the benefits perfectly, and they make sense, but platform boarding doors for metro systems are my worst nightmare. Removing the rush of air and unobstructed view of a train arriving in a station is an unimaginable loss of romantic feeling and metaphor from society. Don’t @ me about it.
November 17, 2025 at 7:20 PM
Reposted by Kurt Raschke
[Ed Harris in Apollo 13 voice] alright. What do we have on this spacecraft that isnt gender.
November 12, 2025 at 3:07 AM
I understand that folks may not view transit agencies as paragons of functional behavior. But, in two particular ways, I contend that thinking and acting like a transit agency may improve your life: kurtraschke.com/2025/11/neur...
Thinking (and acting) like a transit agency can improve your life: two vignettes
I realize the assertion in the title of this post may sound outlandish, so I should start by clarifying: when I say “thinking and acting like a transit agency”, I don’t mean showing up late, or perhap...
kurtraschke.com
November 9, 2025 at 4:55 PM
Reposted by Kurt Raschke
finally wrote that blog post, in which i argue that "people will lie about using AI for coding" is not a good reason to allow people to use AI for coding:

blog.xkeeper.net/thoughts/ran...
November 3, 2025 at 8:04 PM
Reposted by Kurt Raschke
like, i’m sorry man, but gun to my head, i’ll take the statistical probability of another fukushima nuclear disaster over the certainty of what we’re losing to climate change

turning off existing nuclear plants before we’re out of fossil fuel consumption to displace is objectively insane!
November 3, 2025 at 9:49 PM
I seldom post on LinkedIn, so you should know that when I do it must be for a darn good reason. In this case, the Subways Performance Analysis Unit, a great group of people I work with closely, is hiring for an analyst:

www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...
Transit Management Analyst Series - Performance Analysis Unit (PAU) in Brooklyn, New York, United States | Kurt Raschke
In 1981, after the landing of the first Space Shuttle mission—the first time a reusable space vehicle had ever been launched and returned to Earth fit to fly again—Johnson Space Center Director Chris ...
www.linkedin.com
November 4, 2025 at 2:01 AM
The interminable wait for DNS to propagate.
November 1, 2025 at 8:00 PM
What can you learn from 80 million GTFS-realtime feed fetches? I dig into the good, bad, and ugly of real-time transit data in my latest post: kurtraschke.com/2025/10/gtfs...
Lessons learned from consuming GTFS-realtime at scale, hundreds of billions of StopTimeUpdates later…
Disclaimer: I work for a transit agency and have, at times, worked on passenger information and open data. The views contained in this post are entirely my own and not reflective of or endorsed by any...
kurtraschke.com
October 29, 2025 at 1:02 AM
Happy Subway Day!
October 27, 2025 at 11:59 AM