Dustin 🚌🚶‍♂️🚲

DOT Engineer | Sustainable Transportation | Safe Systems | Advocate for Livable Communities

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Hiding the bins is the least interesting part of what the Netherlands built here.

Underneath each of these is a 4 cubic metre container serving a whole block, emptied by one operator who never touches a bag. Rotterdam alone runs about 4,800 of them.

The real upgrade is the sensor inside. Each container reports how full it is, so collection stopped running on a fixed Tuesday-and-Friday schedule and started running on demand. A truck rolls when a container crosses 70%, not when the calendar says so.

That single change collapses the route. Fewer stops, fewer trucks on the road, fewer labor hours, less mileage burned driving to half-empty bins.

The spotless street is a byproduct. Nothing sits at the curb because the drop-off point is below ground and the truck only appears when the data tells it to.

Most cities still run trash pickup on a fixed calendar. The Dutch turned it into a routing problem and let fill data decide when the truck moves. That's the part worth copying, and it has nothing to do with the crane.

[Hunter📈🌈📊 @StatisticUrban]

American cities tend to have too many massive parks and too few small, integrated ones.

Like much of America, centralized green spaces surrounded by auto-centric infrastructure are just not that nice. They leave residential neighborhoods starved of smaller, everyday spaces.

[Dustin 🚌🚶‍♂️🚲 @EngineerDustin]

@humantransit Is this a theory? Or rooted in some research somewhere? I’d love to hear more.

[Dustin 🚌🚶‍♂️🚲 @EngineerDustin]

Car brain, amirite?

[Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈 @maxdubler]

Cities should not sacrifice their residents’ quality of life on the altar of suburban motorists’ convenience.

[Dustin 🚌🚶‍♂️🚲 @EngineerDustin]

Designing our cities exclusively around cars and car-related access is just repeatedly solving this geometry problem over and over again, but with diminishing returns.

Focusing on walking, biking, and taking transit is often better (and more fun).

[Adam Tranter @adamtranter]

Bicycles are hugely space efficient, which is why they make a lot of sense in congested cities. This video demonstrates why there aren’t traffic jams in bike lanes.

[Dustin 🚌🚶‍♂️🚲 @EngineerDustin]

@SauntValerian I’m not thinking out of the box, I’m thinking ON the box.

[Dustin 🚌🚶‍♂️🚲 @EngineerDustin]

I’m officially CPTED certified now and my official recommendation is to put skateable benches everywhere to “activate the space.”

[Dustin 🚌🚶‍♂️🚲 @EngineerDustin]

And plenty of lighting so they can skate at night.

[Mason Home Builder @bankertobuilder]

Every neighborhood should have a cute, walkable coffee shop in it

[Dave @DE_Gifford]

Some people will tell you we can't build new buildings that fit the neighborhood character without adding acres of new parking. Corktown, Detroit.

[JC Reindl @jcreindl]

Wow. After a month and a half closure, looks like Detroit’s People Mover is back.

[Dustin 🚌🚶‍♂️🚲 @EngineerDustin]

I left Detroit in 2008, so the city is VERY disorienting for me now.

[Dion @2024dion]

Spent some time walking around downtown Detroit this afternoon. Most of the 2010s projects that were ongoing when I left in 2022 are complete (Hudson’s Site, Book Tower, a few smaller buildings) but it doesn’t seem that there’s much that’s new, which is a crazy contrast to my first time here in 2019 whew every block seemed to have something going on.

The UM building and the convention center hotel are the only new construction going up, it seems, and all the buildings that were vacant when I left are still vacant. My old office tower, the Michigan Building, looks like it might be totally empty now too. Retail vacancies are about the same, maybe slightly down at best. The qline hasn’t upgraded its ROW and the cars are already aging fast.

It’s a bit of whiplash for me after spending last week in Austin where the 2020s have had explosive physical growth downtown & everything was both new and packed.

I don’t know if the pandemic just crushed office occupancy and made downtown less desirable to live in, or if the low hanging fruit has been plucked and now Gilbert has pulled back, or what, but the vibrancy and promise of the 2010s seems to have slacked off.

[the hotter kenny omega @SamGreszes]

You don't hear about this bc it is specifically related to adding protected bike lanes and its illegal in the usa to imply that infringing on people's god given right to 8-lane residential roads might be necessary for traffic safety

[Jason, @jasonc_nc]

Many city parks depts view “commerce” in parks negatively. No one can adequately explain why, but it’s reality. It’s also self-defeating as it creates a revenue source & drives higher usage.

Unfortunately many parks dept heads measure success by acres owned, not visitors per acre. More cities need to adopt the kiosk strategy of Lisbon and elsewhere.

[Dustin 🚌🚶‍♂️🚲 @EngineerDustin]

This place was super fun and it’s a shame that it didn’t last.

[. @Jaykelz]

Should’ve kept this as a public space . Would’ve been the perfect place for teens to hangout downtown .

[Dustin 🚌🚶‍♂️🚲 @EngineerDustin]

We dig these up often in Michigan. I’ve seen a couple different styles too. I’ve heard Monroe even still has some in service!

[Wall Street Apes @WallStreetApes]

This is crazy

American worker “I've been working in Chicago for a while now. I've only heard stories of the wooden water mains, but today I finally found one”

“Check that out. All wood crazy”

Chicago has had public water delivered by wooden water mains…. These mains have been being slowly decommissioned and replaced with modern ones, some just being replaced as early as 2020

[Dustin 🚌🚶‍♂️🚲 @EngineerDustin]

@faraz_r_khan Yes, your house is absolutely making you sick. Get a dust sample and run an ERMI test on it.

[Dustin 🚌🚶‍♂️🚲 @EngineerDustin]

1. Humbly observe where people in your community are struggling.

2. Ask "What's the next smallest thing we can do to address that struggle *right now*?"

3. Do that thing. Right now.

4. Repeat

[Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @NYCMayor]

Hey New York, no one likes unnecessary scaffolding.

Thankfully, we have a plan — and John Wilson is here to help break it down.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

The people in this photo aren't friendlier than you. Their apartments are just smaller. So small that Parisians basically gave up on living indoors and moved their living rooms onto the sidewalk. And that was the whole plan.

In the 1850s, a city planner named Baron Haussmann tore apart medieval Paris and rebuilt it. He widened streets into boulevards, capped every building at five stories, and added one rule that explains this entire photo: the ground floor of every building had to be a café, a bakery, or a shop. The apartments above were intentionally tiny. Some were single rooms carved out of old mansions. No garden. Barely any sunlight. A private balcony was something most Parisians would never have.

So the café became home. You ate breakfast there. Held meetings there. Received your mail there. By the late 1700s, Paris already had close to 2,000 of them. In 2002, there were still 1,907. Even now, after years of closures brought that number to about 1,410, the coverage is absurd: a 2020 city study found 94% of Parisians live within a five-minute walk of a bakery. When COVID shut indoor dining in 2020, Paris ripped out parking spaces, turned them into outdoor terraces, and let 9,800 cafés and restaurants keep them permanently.

An American sociologist named Ray Oldenburg wrote a book in 1989 called The Great Good Place. He had a name for spots like the Parisian café: "third places." Not your home, not your office, but the casual in-between spots where you actually get to know people. Cafés, pubs, barbershops, the corner store where the owner knows your name. His whole argument was that American suburbs were built with only two zones, your house and your job, connected by a car. No sidewalk café, no place to bump into a neighbor by accident.

The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a national health epidemic in 2023. Being alone all the time is as bad for your body as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Half of American adults say they feel lonely. Weekly socializing dropped from 5.5 hours in 2003 to just 4 hours in 2023, and it never bounced back after COVID. Americans between 15 and 29 now spend 45% more time alone than they did in 2010.

The scene in this tweet looks like a personality trait. It is a 170-year-old engineering project that works exactly as designed.