Alon (they/them)'s avatar

Alon (they/them)

@alonlevy.bsky.social

1215 followers 229 following 7345 posts

Transit researcher in Berlin. Lived in Tel Aviv, Singapore, the Riviera, New York, Providence, Vancouver, Stockholm, Paris. pedestrianobservations.com/ patreon.com/alonlevy alon@pedestrianobservations.com @alon@mastodon.social

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

Or the Derg, or the Khmer Rouge. (People need to stop with the "communism at least was good for decolonization in Africa" cope.)

0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

גם כאן עודדו את הולנד. :(

0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

It's a war crime to militarize hospitals and schools the way Hamas does, precisely because that leads the enemy to justifiably attack these sites and then the population loses its access to health care and education. That's the only story.

0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

Not "plausible"; it was confirmed by OSINT within hours, but by then, the entire Arab world had come to blame the IDF, and Jordan walked away from a summit. Once bitten, twice shy. Later came IDF raids on (not bombings of) hospitals, which turned out to have Hamas tunnels, like Al-Shifa.

1 replies 0 reposts 0 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

I really don't think you can explain this through the difference between Dutch Calvinists and American Methodists/Baptists/w/e.

0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

Hey, the Nordic countries are thoroughly Protestant and substantially so are Germany and the Netherlands.

1 replies 0 reposts 0 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

That's just five years older than Trump was when Barron was born...

0 replies 0 reposts 4 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

How much does this matter? Clooney is not endorsing Trump; the Democratic alternatives to Biden aren't going to govern differently from Biden, and in particular aren't giving rich people tax cuts that Biden isn't.

1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

Hmmm. For example, if they go to the same cities as Amtrak, is there any attempt to have the frequencies intercalate?

1 replies 0 reposts 0 likes

Reposted by Alon (they/them)

Victor Ray's avatar Victor Ray @victorerikray.bsky.social
[ View ]

This is such a cool study. It reminded me of an interview I heard with Ta-Nehisi Coates about him writing comics. He said something along the lines of his comics writing enraged folks more than anything else and he realized he was messing with their foundational stories.

2 replies 22 reposts 58 likes

Reposted by Alon (they/them)

Mark Chadbourn's avatar Mark Chadbourn @chadbourn.bsky.social
[ View ]

More on that “peace” agenda. Medvedev: “Even if Ukraine surrenders the territories we claim and renounces NATO aspirations in exchange for a peace deal, sooner or later we would still have to put the nail into the coffin of Ukrainian statehood and return the rest of the country’s lands to Russia”.

9 replies 85 reposts 202 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

Are these bus services coordinated with Amtrak?

2 replies 0 reposts 0 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

Das ist für die Summe des 16. und 17. Abschnitts...

0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

Because who the fuck knows anything about the background of Franklin Pierce and other 19c presidents who aren't Lincoln?

1 replies 0 reposts 5 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

There's land aid coming into the Gaza Strip by now; the settler orgs stopped attacking convoys after Standing Together set escorts. The problem is distribution within the Strip, as Hamas systematically executes any civil society members who try to coordinate aid distribution.

0 replies 0 reposts 5 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

...12? Who besides Washington, Grant, and Eisenhower?

3 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

I think regional trains the scale of Caltrain would have constant-tension catenary here? I'm not as informed on this outside the UK. Trolleywire is different as I understand it.

0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

The US can always take a page from Israel and normalize former chairs of the joint chiefs parachuting to their preferred party's presidential nomination...

1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

You mean Al-Ahli? Yeah, the revelations by morning that the impact crater was consistent with a failed PIJ rocket launch and not with any ammunition the IDF uses got some people to be warier of repeating accusations of war crimes against the IDF. Clearly not everyone, like Albanese. But some people.

2 replies 0 reposts 2 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

I don't see the GOP even coming close to what's normalized here in Germany with blanket Sunday closures. They're way too Thatcherite and not sufficiently One-Nation Conservative for this. (In Singapore, beloved by US/UK Thatcherites, stores are open on Christmas, too.)

0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

Ja, ich weiß. Aber, Seoul nicht nur baut Autobahnen ab, sondern auch baut U- und S-Bahnen. Hier in Berlin, weder Rot-Rot-Grün noch Schwarz-Rot verlängert U8 bis zum Märkisches Viertel...

1 replies 0 reposts 2 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

Ich glaube, dass dies sowohl der 16. als auch der 17. Abschnitt ist.

1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Reposted by Alon (they/them)

Yonah Freemark's avatar Yonah Freemark @yfreemark.bsky.social
[ View ]

Paris & its suburbs have undergone massive reductions in car use in last years, as I explore here: www.urban.org/urban-wire/h...

But what I didn't get into are the politics behind these changes: How has Paris reduced car-centric street space & increased noncar transport investment? 🧵

1 replies 5 reposts 20 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

Yeah, but the US census not only doesn't ask about religion but also expressly does not classify Jews as anything other than ethnic descendants of their original countries, at the behest of Jewish orgs who, after WW2, didn't want the government to know where Jews lived.

0 replies 0 reposts 7 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

The US census/ACS specifically requests you not mention religious background, though. (I put in Israeli when I got the census, rather than reaching out to my previous ancestries.)

1 replies 0 reposts 7 likes

Reposted by Alon (they/them)

Nolan Hicks's avatar Nolan Hicks @ndhapple.bsky.social
[ View ]

THE WIRES: How deferred maintenance, short-staffing, a shelved modernization, mismanagement, and starving Amtrak for decades set the stage for crippling electrical failures on NE Corridor — a decrepit power grid that slows down service, even when it works: www.curbed.com/article/amtr...

1 replies 43 reposts 110 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

Yeah, a Brazilian urbanist magazine occasionally runs translations of my posts. I don't verify the translations, but that's because I've had a longstanding if loose online relationship with one of their writers, so there are reputational costs to mistranslation.

0 replies 0 reposts 5 likes

Reposted by Alon (they/them)

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

Will happily talk to you about Project 2025's mass transit plan, if you'd like me to.

0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

The infrastructure bit might just be New York, where maintenance is atypically bad (but yeah, it's also generally bad in the US by first-world standards). Rail renewal in Connecticut costs annually about the same as a once-in-a-generation program in Germany and has worse service disruption.

1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

The expected target is ~2.7° on current policy, globally. And yeah, it would change infrastructure but not hugely, and in places that do proper maintenance, nobody blames outages on warming. Metal and concrete are more resilient than ecosystems or icebergs. climateactiontracker.org/global/tempe...

1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

It's not about 1.5c weather (these temperatures, again, occurred regularly in New York summers 20+ years ago), and it's not about either taxes or NIMBYs - the maintenance practices are just inefficient relative to modern technology.

2 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Reposted by Alon (they/them)

Judah Grunstein's avatar Judah Grunstein @judah-grunstein.bsky.social
[ View ]

I was a bit rash with this one, and those who said the RN is too much of a family business for MLP to be forced out are probably right. What I should have said is that MLP will retire to the back offices if the party wants to win, and that their will be blood in the weeks/months to come.

1 replies 6 reposts 20 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

(Not defunding mass transit but replacing the federal 80:20 ratio with unrestricted grants to states; in effect, this defunds blue-city-in-red-state mass transit lines, but those have zero ridership to begin with, while the workhorse blue-city-in-blue-state lines will not be affected.)

0 replies 0 reposts 4 likes

Reposted by Alon (they/them)

Mara Wilson's avatar Mara Wilson @marawilson.bsky.social
[ View ]

I always liked that Onion headline about romantic comedy behavior leading to a man getting arrested But honestly, I’ve read a good number of romantic comedy books in the past few years, and if anybody’s getting arrested, it’s those who behave like the romantic comedy heroine’s sassy best friend

40 replies 62 reposts 986 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

The most reliable and EU-compliant way to reduce immigration numbers is to wreck the economy and keep unemployment high. Spain's net migration turned negative in the 2010s; if you don't like immigrants (let's face it, it's NL, of course they don't), be like that. www.euronews.com/my-europe/20...

1 replies 4 reposts 16 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

Long waits suck in both the heat and the cold; the range of warming we're seeing under climate change isn't really relevant to why all bus stops should have shelter.

1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

The actual Jane Jacobs supported the downzoning of the Village on the grounds that new buildings were of no use to the neighborhood's preexisting residents, opposed elevator buildings, and then moved to Toronto and supported NIMBY downzonings there too.

0 replies 0 reposts 7 likes

Reposted by Alon (they/them)

Yair Wallach's avatar Yair Wallach @yairwallach.bsky.social
[ View ]

Story in Haaretz: on 7th Oct a Hamas stopped (in the Negev) a van, driven by a Palestinian citizen of Israel, carrying 7 Palestinian workers from Gaza. They shot dead the driver and five workers. Two workers managed to get back to Gaza alive. Only now Haaretz was able to confirm these details

1 replies 18 reposts 27 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

כן, זהו, הטענה שלי היא שהם בשוליים גם בנאציה וגם במשת״פיה.

0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

מי, ארגוני הטרור? להיפך, גם לממשלות שמאל הם לא נותנים קרדיט בשיט. ז׳וספן העביר חוק ביטוח בריאות מקיף וכל כך הרבה הצביעו לקומוניסטים במקום לו בסיבוב הראשון שהוא אפילו לא הגיע לסיבוב השני.

1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

But a lot of rich people just avoided these taxes through legal exemptions... that's why the alternative minimum tax was introduced in 1969. Evidently, the US wasn't more unequal in 1979 than in the 1950s. It got more unequal under Reagan, but 70% is not a universal maximum income.

1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Alon (they/them)'s avatar Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social
[ View ]

[CRIF's survey on France finds different class and racial load for these questions than conspiracy-loaded questions.] 2. Why do the results not just indicate that countries where more educated people are less anti-Semitic are likelier to endorse anti-anti-Semitism resolutions?

0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes