Most frightening and/or depressing story: Donald Shoup died in February. He was a pioneer in parking economics, which doesn’t sound all that sexy, but his clear explanations really helped me see the light of what walkable, livable, healthy and low environmental impact cities can potentially be. What they can’t be is low-density and automobile-oriented. I put this in the depressing category both because I am sad at his passing, and because I do not see these trends going in the right direction.

Most hopeful story: The fool in the White House and the devils whispering in his ear can weaken enforcement of the Civil Rights Act, but they can’t actually make laws go away. They can try to ignore them, and then we will see how effective our court system and third party legal action can be at activating the checks and balances we are supposed to have. The other potential players are congress and widespread public action, and these do not seem to be active at the moment.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I continued to follow the emergence of AI agents in February. Outside the bananas state of U.S. and global geopolitics, this is one of the biggest things going on, or at least a big change playing out quickly. Even a “singularity watch” item – I’m going to give a 5% chance this is the start of the singularity. Hopefully not the Terminator version. But has anyone noticed we now have Starlink and Stargate – these even sound like Skynet. We already had Operation Warp Speed of course. What puzzles me is that conservatives usually don’t like science fiction because they lack imagination. So either somebody is a science fiction fan, or more likely they have these words in the backs of their minds from indirect exposure to science fiction, and now they think they thought of them.