Mon, 27 Apr 2026 13:28:17 -0500

Here’s one way to use an AI summary function: stress testing opinion pieces against the facts. I ran the latest essay from local urban development curmudgeon Paul Fanlund through Claude and asked it to stress-test his arguments about ageism and city development in Madison, WI. Here’s what it says:

“On housing, Fanlund implies that development pressure is ideological overreach and that its critics skew old. Neither holds. Madison has a genuine supply problem — the city is targeting 15,000 new homes by 2030, and opposition to density isn’t age-sorted; it cuts across longtime homeowners who feel the planning process has been opaque.

“On streets, the column is flatly at odds with the evidence. Road diets reduce crash frequency and severity, and decrease pedestrian exposure to traffic. Older adults are among the most vulnerable pedestrians — street calming protects them more than it inconveniences them. Framing lane reductions as an anti-senior policy inverts what the safety data actually shows.

“There’s also a structural irony: Fanlund criticizes generational stereotyping while using “older residents” as shorthand for a specific political position on cars and density. That’s the same move, just pointed in a direction he agrees with.”

I served for two years on a traffic commission, and in my experience the civic tension between “road diets” and other road calming methods is real. The problem with advocating for traditional interventions like signage over modern interventions like road diets and roundabouts? Nobody listens to them.

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:22:52 -0500

Fellow Madisonians, someone pulled together a website ranking local businesses in Madison by how local they are (by what criteria, idk). In my experience, this is one way we’re likely to see AI used in the next couple of years, via prototyping and/or executing ideas that result in dynamic websites.

Madison on F L O T I S S E R I E