Teamsters vs. Waymo, Subway Takes Annoys Urbanists, & More
Around the College Towns: Links and commentary related to urbanism and higher ed for the week of June 26 - Aug. 1
Note: Around the College Town is my weekly links roundup article on urbanism and education. This weekly post mostly covers news that may have fallen through the cracks rather than the big events. I am on the road this week again, so this edition will be a bit light.
Teamsters Demand Waymo Slow Expansion
Teamsters in the Boston area held a rally to demand Waymo slow its expansion this week. The self-driving car company is slowly spreading to cities across the country, but they are now running into roadblocks from local opposition.
Christian Britschgi, a journalist at Reason, calls it “The anti-things getting better coalition.” The Boston city council also introduced measures to force the company to create an advisory board, which would be “stacked with unions,” according to Britschgi.
It does seem like many Americans still have their head in the sand around self-driving cars. The technology is here and can basically replace most car trips people will need. I was in San Francisco this week, where Waymos are everywhere. Tourists are still enamored with them, taking photos and viewing them as a novelty. Yet they are getting the job done in a much safer and cheaper manner. Self-driving cars aren’t just the future, they are the now.
But as I predicted, the battle of self-driving cars will be rage hot like any of our most controversial cultural war issues. The unions coming out against the technology are just one of the first steps in moving the issue further onto this agenda. We have already seen protesters target these vehicles during demonstrations.
In lefty circles, the perceptions of self-driving cars have been painted as a kind of techno-corporate takeover. On the right, there is a general distrust of new tech, plus the pervasive perception that cars mean freedom. Elon Musk being a vocal advocate does not help in either camp, even though this version is worse and further behind Waymo.
In some ways, I do empathize with the Teamsters; this tech will absolutely gobble most driving jobs. As an educator, I do think about how we can grapple with this kind of displacement.
That being said, I have already staked my claim in the pro-self-driving car camp. There are too many externalities degrading much of society with human drivers that we simply take for granted. The sooner we let the robots take over, the better. I will further defend this stance in the future.
Links I’m Reading This Week
Education
Over 1,000 colleges may not qualify for federal aid due to student loan defaults. Important note: most are for-profit. I’ll have a future post on this.
There was an uptick in acceptance to the University of California schools for Fall 2025:
The differences were found thanks to an ApplyingToCollege user. StarRez’s annual survey on campus housing shows students are getting less satisfied with their accommodations.
East Texas A&M University is redeveloping one of its iconic campus buildings into a dorm after years of academic use. It’s always good to reinvigorate our beautiful spaces on campuses.
In more good dorm news, The University of Wyoming is completing an almost $290 million dorm and dining facility project. And the new construction isn’t ugly. In fact, it’s gorgeous. It can be done!
Urbanism
Guangzhou, China, opens two new metro lines, both with significant automation.
Likewise, Mumbai, India, is set to fully open its impressive #3 line
The last Sears in California closed this week. I was out of town or else I would have covered it.
A historic Carnegie Library is up for sale at just $375K! It’s a little run-down but still beautiful. I am a sucker for old Carnegie Libraries and will have a future article on them.
The citizen-science app iNaturalist is helping real scientists do real science. Hey, smartphones aren’t all bad!
Fur-Fish-Game magazine turns 100 this year. Usually, I am mourning obits in the magazine world. But this one still seems to be going strong.
Another magazine, Travel + Leisure, released its US airport rankings as voted by readers. They are mostly in smaller to mid-sized cities like OKC at #6.
Around Substack
Note: I also think it’s important to stay connected to the growing Substack community. Here are a few I am reading this week:
Jonathan Hale, a writer and advocate in LA, has a call to action over a crosswalk in his neighborhood. The city has ignored requests to make the street safer for years. Fed up, locals installed some good old-fashioned tactical urbanism, which the city was quick to remove. People are angry.
Stop and watch the flow of traffic and people at the corners around the park and you won’t have to wait long before witnessing a close call. Getting hit by a car is the leading cause of death for children between the ages of 5 and 14 in Los Angeles. That’s why I decided to organize a group of neighbors and community members to paint two crosswalks leading to the park at each of the park’s four corners. I didn’t want to wait for a child to die before we took action to make our streets safer.
The YIMBY Manifesto has a post on the struggles of St. Louis due to minimum lot size requirements. These requirements don’t get as many headlines, but they can be just as burdensome for redevelopment.
Smaller lot sizes are an obvious tool to combat these issues. We can fit more people in our cities. We can build more taxable homes. We can make the average home cheaper. We can bring back residents who did not find what they were looking for in the urban core. We can even make the city more fun, more walkable, more diverse, and probably more interesting along the way.
Finally… Subway Takes Annoys Urbanists
It seems we cannot go a week without my fellow urbanists getting annoyed at someone online for saying or doing something viewed as opposed to the movement. This time it’s Subway Takes, the online comedy series hosted by Kareem Rahma where guests offer their hot takes while riding the rails (usually on the NYC subway, although not always).
You might think that this transit-friendly formatted show would mesh well with urbanists’ sensibilities. But not this week!
The joke is that conservatives just stay in their own neighborhoods so they can’t gentrify anything in the cities. Some urbanists on social media were not happy with the gentrification talk. You can see the quote Tweet response, and from a lot of people I like and follow!
The critics were bringing up segregation, white flight, and other serious housing issues. And I get it: the discourse around gentrification has been annoying in recent years (I’m in academia after all). But Subway Takes is not a classroom nor an op-ed. It’s two guys firing off hot takes, laughing, and joking about the topic.
This is fine banter for a comedy show on TikTok. They were clearly messing around. “One blue hair per capita,” jokes the guest. “I’m racist against blue hairs,” fires back Kareem. This is fine and funny banter! It’s not an intellectual debate on housing and cities. The video even closes with:
“Are you a gentrifier?”
“Of course!”
I am, again, coming out and asking my fellow urbanists to chill out a bit. Not everything is a charged community meeting about a proposed apartment in the suburbs.
Thanks for the shoutout dude!!
Thanks for the shout out and great piece!