What I love about this most is the voice over. 99 times out of 100 it’s a mistake, but Skarsgard hits the disinterested, a little passive-aggressive, tone of Murderbot so well. The trailer feels like the book feels in my head, vibe-wise, so I’m looking forward to this as I love the books.

Senate Bill 5595 would encourage “shared” people-oriented streets.

What is a street if not shared public space? A city street is one of the few instances of true and actual public space in the city, at least in theory: it is always open; there is no cost to enter. You do not need a reason to be in it, and it is meant to accommodate all types of presence and uses. 

If your street or those you use daily do not feel that way to you, it is because we have designed and programmed our streets to operate as a monoculture: hospitable to cars first and foremost, and merely tolerant of everyone else. 

How safe and welcome do you feel on your streets? Anecdotal and empirical evidence indicates that the majority of U.S. residents do not feel safe or welcome on our streets — and that isn’t just people who walk or bike. U.S. roads are twice as deadly as roads in other parts of the world, and that’s saying something given our high engineering standards. Washington State has seen increases in road violence and death involving cars.

This is the cost of designing our public easements to privilege cars above people. A new piece of legislation, SB 5595, could — above its stated intentions — help us rethink and reclaim the street as a true public easement. If passed and its provisions delivered, we can look forward to streets that are not only more welcoming of public life, but a lot less deadly. 

SB 5595, Establishing shared streets, allows “a local authority” to designate “any nonarterial highway that is not a state highway to be a ‘shared street,’” a designation that allows for vehicular traffic that does not exceed 10 miles per hour and where pedestrians, bicyclists, and people using micromobility devices (referring to motorized and non-motorized scooters, and motorized chairs). 

I have been thinking about streets and the role these are allowed to play in our cities in light of the lessons we learned (or didn’t, maybe) during the pandemic. The pandemic offered a glimpse of what our streets could be — if we really unlock their potential. Seattle, like many cities, established an “open streets” program, wherein neighbors could use their streets for safe gathering, child’s play, jogging and walking, and more. Tacoma, like many cities, established a program through which businesses could occupy sidewalks and parking spaces for outdoor seating.

We also see how useful our streets could be during festivals and block parties. More than parks, plazas, and other designated recreational spaces, our streets are the most abundant instance of public space. It’s too bad so few of us get to use them fully but for a few select times each year. 

SB 5595 states that a local authority can designate a street a “shared” street by placing traffic control devices “where pedestrians, bicyclists, and vehicular traffic share a portion or all of the same street.” Again, in my mind a street is a street only by virtue of pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicular traffic sharing a portion or all of the same street.” A roadway that restricts all but vehicles from the roadway is a tollway or a highway. 

Because the street encompasses, technically speaking, sidewalks, planting strips, curbs, gutters, street furniture, utility poles, the utilities running below ground — and, yes — the roadway. It seems that the authors of this bill mean “roadway” when they write street. 

While SB 5595 does remind us that our streets can be more — more public, more optimally used, more safe, and more open — this proposed legislation sends a mixed signal in the sense that all streets are already shared. We do not need to pass a law to establish this reality. But proposing such a law is yet another reminder that our streets are failing us. 

SB 5595 joins efforts such as road diets and complete streets in our continuing effort to reclaim our public space. The bill provides local governments with a legal mechanism through which to enforce the public easements so few of us get to actually experience in our streets.

We do not experience streets as true public easements because automobile companies and auto enthusiasts have lobbied for restricting streets to automobiles only, arguing that streets are for cars and that anyone else who would think of using a street is a “jay,” an idiot. And that’s what it feels like to be a pedestrian on our streets today, does it not? 

Their efforts have transformed our sense of what a street is, and the physical shape of streets themselves.

Through 2024, the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD)—a huge tome that establishes the look, feel, and function of all streets in the U.S. — encoded prescribed designs that make it unsafe for anyone not in a car to be in a street. A recent update moves state and other agencies towards the recognition that streets are sometimes used by people not in cars, and that more can be done to design streets so that these persons aren’t injured or killed by people in cars. 

This is a small but significant shift. But it is not enough; for now, the MUTCD and the engineers who rely on it to design streets seem to assume that a street is only a street if it has a car in it. SB 5595 reminds us that it could be otherwise. More needs to be done to change our sense that streets can accommodate and support public life without putting people at risk of death or violence. 

It’s way past time for things to be different. We need more public space — and we need it not to be dangerous. For a street to be experienced as a truly shared public space cars must be subordinated to other public uses. SB 5595 provides for that not through the exclusion of cars (though some streets could exclude them and still be a street), but by stipulating that vehicles be operated at low (people-friendly) speeds—10 miles per hour.

SB 5595 could be the start of a reformation of our thinking regarding the public realm and its potential. It may be the start of a process through which we retake more of our most precious public space, the street.

When I think of a shared street I think of State Street in Madison, Wisconsin. Here is an eight-block-long street connecting the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus to the Wisconsin State Capitol. The street does not wholly exclude vehicles — busses and delivery and service vehicles are allowed at low speeds. State Street is the city’s Main Street — and it actually functions as that. The shops, eateries, bars, and other businesses that line State Street are always busy. Local businesses thrive here because people prefer to walk up and down State Street rather than other, car-ridden streets. 

State Street in Madison is a strong opposing argument to all who say that not accommodating cars “kills business.” It is a strong argument for the value and potential of SB 5595.

(This even as SB 5595 calls for traffic control devices and annual reporting on “accidents” involving vehicles and DUIs, two requirements that may prevent “local authorities” from implementing shared streets as these encumber already scarce public resources; if anything, these requirements make their own case for why we so desperately needs shared streets that are actually shared as they speak to fear we have of private vehicles on public space). 

If we are to use traffic-control devices to delineate the shared street that is actually shared then we have a model in London’s low-traffic neighborhoods (LTNs). LTNs are a solution to a problem leaders in London have been grappling with — one all too known to us in Puget Sound: road networks that are oversaturated with motor vehicles.

LTNs are, in practical terms, simple. Street planters or other “filters,” such as metal gates or even just monitoring cameras, are used to block traffic from using residential streets. They are strategically placed in order to keep the flow of cars on main roads and away from people’s homes, where noise and air pollution can have a serious impact.

Peter Yeung – Reasons To Be Cheerful

I observed such an LTN in another context, Córdova, Spain, where local neighborhoods used bollards to prevent non-local traffic from entering neighborhoods. Within the neighborhood vehicles were kept to low speeds by other design features (not only through aspirational measures such as posted speed limits) such as planters and street trees. If these streets were inaccessible to most private vehicles, they were fully accessible to people on foot or bike, and the experience of being on these streets was safe and comfortable. 

If the pandemic taught us anything about public space it is that we need it and that we don’t have access to enough of it. It’s there; most of us just can’t use it fully. And the most abundant instance of public space is uncomfortable to be in (at best) or deadly (at worse) for most.

If the pandemic taught us something else about public space is that it does not take much to realize the street’s potential.

I would argue that we need neither traffic control devices nor a new law to use our streets as they are meant to be used (we were able to do it during the pandemic, and societies outside of the U.S. have been leveraging streets in more life-sustaining ways for a lot longer than the U.S. has been an urban nation). Still, there is utility in this bill in that it helps remind us that our streets can be more than a monoculture. Also, it gives traffic engineers an incentive to rethink the street and, in time, to design streets that are actually shared.

Just as we are learning that monoculture is an unsustainable way to grow our food, we are learning that monoculture on our streets is an unsustainable way to design and program our streets. Our streets are capable of sustaining more than a single use — vehicle circulation — they can be a place for public life in everyday living. 

SB 5595 may begin with an incomplete sense of what streets are, but its true value lies in reminding us of their potential and in how it provides cities in Washington with a legal avenue through which to reclaim our abundant public space for people.

To stay alive, SB 5595 must advance out of the state House before the opposite house cutoff on April 16. It’s scheduled for executive session in the House’s Transportation Committee this afternoon. Comment on the bill on the legislation page.

Advocates Advance ‘Pedestrianize This’ Campaign, Is SDOT Ready to Listen?

The post State Bill Could Unleash Potential of Streets, Making Space for People first appeared on The Urbanist.

A lot of us feel hopeless today. There’s the return of energy dominance as a federal goal, which places oil, gas and coal extraction above all other uses.

There’s the extinction crisis affecting animals and plants that’s 1,000 to 10,000 times the regular rate of extinction. Then there’s the erosion of soil, as half of the planet’s topsoil has been lost in the past 150 years.

Water pollution has increased because about 80% of untreated wastewaters worldwide get discharged into waterways that supply communities.

Worse is the elephant in the room—climate change—causing ever more major floods, violent hurricanes and extreme wildfires. Last year was also the first year the world exceeded the climate threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, at which climate impacts are expected to significantly increase.

These are just the headlines. It seems so grim today on Planet Earth that archaeologists, biologists and other ologists want to name this epoch the “Anthropocene”

for our human-dominated, hopeless present.

Is there an alternative to this gloom and doom? To function, I think there has to be, and much of that certainty comes out of a freshman course I teach called Environmental Conservation at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.

A hundred or more students enroll each semester, representing majors from pre-business to interior design, and the students are just three months out of high school when they arrive in the fall. The world they’ve begun studying seems anything but stable.

At the beginning of the semester, I ask them if their generation can “save the world.” There are always optimists who say “yes,” though in recent years fewer and fewer hands reach for the ceiling.

Over the course of the semester, we discuss the losses on the land and to wildlife, as well as the impacts of human population growth, the starkly different levels of per-capita global consumption, and the unintended consequences of technology. 

We also gain familiarity with our local and regional watershed. We do that by participating in “ecological restoration” workdays, going to work on ranches with conservation easements. There the young students use their hands and tools to protect water sources, build wildlife-friendly crossings, and slow soil erosion by filling in gullies, among other solutions.

Watershed-based experiences like this can cut through the murky esoteric to the pragmatic: There are ways to live on our home planet without spoiling it. The best part is seeing students shifting away from a sense of despair.

Colorado has over 150 collaborative conservation groups—  collaborativeconservation.org—that bring people together where they live, work, recreate and worship. Their aim is to improve the health of soil, water, plants and wildlife. This movement has grown West-wide, spanning 11 states.

The antidote to our planet’s illnesses also has global reach. Paul Hawken, in his book, The Blessed Unrest, describes the more than one million bottom-up groups around the globe working toward environmental sustainability and social justice. Unlike traditional movements, this network is decentralized, collaborative, diverse and not driven by a single ideology or leader.

This good news applies to climate change as well, even though President Trump has, for the second time, removed the United States from the Paris Climate Accord. That leaves our country in the company of Yemen, Libya and Iran.

But people concerned about global warming reacted by going public and objecting. More than 3,800 leaders from America’s city halls, state houses, boardrooms and college campuses have signed the “We Are Still In” declaration  (https://www.wearestillin.com/we-are-still-declaration). Signers represent more than 155 million Americans and $9 trillion of the U.S. economy.

My gut tells me that many of us refuse to give in to hopelessness. But can young people, inheriting our mistakes and the determination of some to deny there’s even a crisis, “save the world”? That’s a gigantic ask.

But can they make the watershed where they live better? If the state of one watershed after another improves, might the Earth over time become healthier, one watershed at a time? All we can do where we live is to get involved in conservation locally, regionally or nationally, joining a group or starting our own.

We can also contact our elected representatives to protest this administration’s intent to maximize extractive uses on public lands.

Let’s choose hope, get our hands dirty, and make our optimism real.

Richard Knight is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He works at the intersection of land use and land health in the American West.

The post When reality weighs you down appeared first on Writers On The Range.

Though radically different, the twin budget proposals released early this week by the Washington State Senate and House share a focus on highway expansion. The Senate budget proposes a broad array of new transportation revenue sources intended to stave off cuts, including a brand new 10% sales tax on new e-bikes and a new vehicle fee for public transit agencies. Contrarily, the House budget includes deep cuts across public transit, active transportation, and commute-trip reduction work.

The main thing the two budgets do have in common? A laser focus on getting Washington’s highway capacity projects back on track, after cost increases threatened to force the legislature to cancel or defer many of them indefinitely. Under both budgets, megaprojects like the North Spokane Corridor, the Puget Sound Gateway, Clark County’s Interstate Bridge Replacement, and a widening I-90 at Snoqualmie Pass would all continue to move forward.

Both budgets propose an increase in the state’s gas tax, six cents in the Senate and nine cents in the House, largely because few other revenue sources get close to providing the sums available to fill the gap on these large highway projects. The Senate budget, for example, would allocate $2.5 billion over the next six years to plugging budget holes, while keeping more than $1 billion on hand for potential projects down the road, like the widening of I-5 through the Nisqually Delta near Olympia.

But lurking beneath the surface is the fact that it’s these highway projects themselves that are the root cause of the budget crisis legislators are scrambling to fix. As detailed in presentations to the House and Senate transportation committees last month, deferring highway projects that haven’t yet been contracted would be the easiest path to balancing the state’s transportation budget. But while the two chambers — and the two political parties — in Olympia are out of alignment on many different things, the perceived need to continue hitting the gas pedal on expanding the state highway network is not one of them.

Senate budget focuses on achieving “bipartisan” agreement

The Senate’s proposal would raise more than $3 billion over the next six years via the gas tax increase, a luxury vehicle tax on cars and trucks that cost more than $100,000, expanded rental car and carsharing fees, and increased fees on electric vehicles. It also includes some bizarre revenue options, including the 10% e-bike sales tax, and a move to force transit agencies to not only pay vehicle registration fees on their taxpayer-funded vehicles but also to pay tolls on public roads as well.

Those new taxes are largely symbolic rather than significant revenue generators. An e-bike sales tax only brings in $9 million over a six year period, and additional fees on transit $33 million. This is pocket change in the context of the multi-billion-dollar budget.

Marko Liias (D-21st, Edmonds), chair of the Senate’ transportation committee, was open about the fact that those items were included at the request of the ranking Republican member of the committee, Curtis King (14th, Yakima), in order to bring along other Republicans.

“When we entered into bipartisan negotiation, one of the principles that Senator King served to the table was: if we’re going to be investing more in the system, he wanted as a priority that a variety of users would be contributing,” Liias told The Urbanist.

The Senate’s Republican caucus wanted to repeal Washington’s Climate Commitment Act (CCA), which represents the biggest new funding source for public transit and active transportation projects seen in Olympia in decades. So it’s not surprising that the top Republican on the transportation committee is fine with sticking it to transit riders and people who are trying to get around without a car in Washington. Voters are not on the same page: a Republican-backed state initiative seeking to repeal the CCA just failed by a wide margin in 2024.

Why then is the prospect of producing a bipartisan budget so appealing to the Democratic caucus that they’re willing to go along with the plan? After steadily building their majorities over the last decade, Democrats hold 60% of the seats in both the House and the Senate. That makes a bipartisan package a luxury, rather than a need — unless the package is so unpopular with the Democratic caucus that defections are widespread when it’s up for vote.

Liias told The Urbanist that he sees the benefits accrued outweighing the concessions, and asserted that progressive priorities will ultimately come out ahead in the context of the overall budget.

“The e-bike fee raises $9 million and we invest $266 million over the same time period into additional new funding for active transportation. So we are asking everybody to contribute, but we are leaning in to fund the active transportation, particularly the safe systems infrastructure that people need everywhere,” Liias said.

When it comes to the fact that Washington is on the cusp of rolling out an e-bike rebate at the same time that the Senate is proposing a new surcharge, Liias said at least they weren’t proposing to scrap the rebate program all together. The e-bike rebate program, which has been in the works for nearly two years, is set to make a $300 rebate available to the general public via lottery system, and a separate $1,200 rebate will be open to households showing proof of modest income.

“There certainly was an idea on the table about ending the rebate program,” Liias said. “The surcharges certainly add a little bit to the upfront cost for folks that are low income that qualify for a higher value rebate, and [it] more than covers the surcharge. And for folks that are not low income, it’ll be more than the cost of the surcharge, so they’ll still be getting a net benefit from it.”

$3,000 is not an uncommon price for a more heavy duty e-bike and many cargo e-bikes can run much more than that. That’s spendy for a bike but not as a car replacement, but the larger issue is whether the state should be adding any disincentives to purchasing e-bikes at all.

On the added fees for public transit, Liias pointed to two new grant programs that are included in the Senate budget that will outweigh the new charges on public transit vehicles. One is a $100 million transit safety grant program, and the second is $100 million for green transit projects, e.g. electric bus purchases and charging infrastructure. Neither of those grants would explicitly make up for any lost service that could have been funded via the new added fees that public transit agencies will now have to account for.

While the concept of adding costs to transit agencies and e-bike riders clearly cuts against priorities that the broader Democratic caucus has, the Senate’s Majority Leader is still assessing whether to upset the apple cart over the issue.

“I’m still kind of mulling what to do about that,” Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pedersen (D-43rd, Seattle) told The Urbanist. “I have not yet heard concerns from the agencies about it. If I heard from, you know, Sound Transit or Metro, that it would become a significant problem for them, rather than just a symbolic thing, then that might change my perspective on what I should do.”

House budget focuses on highway projects that are “well underway”

In contrast with the Senate budget, the House proposal does propose putting some highway megaprojects on ice: an expansion of State Route 18 in southeast King County, for example, would be pushed out past 2029, as would a widening of State Route 9 in Snohomish County. In that way, it’s more fiscally conservative than the Senate proposal, which proposes moving full speed ahead with those projects.

“There is a number of projects that we just can’t begin to think about going forward with because of the revenues that we’re working with at this point in time,” House transportation committee chair Jake Fey (D-27th, Tacoma) told reporters Monday.

Fey confirmed that a guiding principle behind the House budget wasn’t which projects were most aligned with state goals, but rather which projects were simply further along in the process.

“A lot of these projects are at different stages. We try to not interrupt projects that were well underway and ready for the next phase. And then there’s some projects that are just in the right-of-way [acquisition] and planning stages, and those were the ones that we were more focused on, pushing those programs and projects out,” Fey said.

But the House proposal also takes an ax to multimodal programs, cutting the state’s Regional Mobility Grant program, which pays for transit access projects around the state. Existing projects will be funded, but no new regional mobility grants will be offered until 2031, under the House’s plan.

And in an ironic move, the House proposal would also indefinitely suspend the Sandy Williams Connecting Communities grant program, which is geared at repairing the harmful legacy of Washington’s past highway decisions. Projects funded via the Sandy Williams program include a study looking at how to improve access to Seattle’s Judkins Park light rail station at Rainier and I-90, and how to improve access across I-5 in Tacoma, in Fey’s district.

Additionally, the House proposal take a hatchet to commute trip reduction (CTR) programs. By providing dollars to organizations around the state that are focused on offering alternatives to single-occupancy vehicle travel, CTR programs encourage transit use, coordinate vanpools, and provide transportation education. Clearly, they are climate programs.

In a letter sent in the wake of the budget’s release, a broad group of organizations engaged in transportation demand management asked for the cuts to be reversed. They include Expedia, Seattle Children’s, Commute Seattle, and cities like Seattle, Bellevue, Tukwila, and Vancouver.

“CTR is a cornerstone of Washington’s efforts to reduce congestion and air pollution, directly supporting the state’s goals under the Clean Air Act. For over 30 years, this program has provided a proven, cost-effective way to reduce single-occupancy vehicle trips and increase access to reliable, affordable transportation,” the letter states. “Cutting CTR funding by 60% would severely undermine the state’s ability to leverage this long-standing, successful program — diminishing our ability to meet state environmental and transportation goals and compromising the effectiveness of a law that has served Washingtonians for decades.”

The sum savings of these cuts is minuscule, even when just looking at the scale of the funding being used to plug highway project budget holes, much less their full project costs. The Puget Sound Gateway projects alone need $153 million to move forward, along with $227 million for Snoqualmie Pass and $267 million for the North Spokane Corridor.

Proposals ignore climate implications

At a time when the federal government is not only withdrawing the U.S. from international climate agreements but also actively working to claw back federal dollars that had been allocated to climate-friendly modes of transportation, the climate impact of the state’s transportation budget remains an area of weakness for Democrats in Olympia.

Ahead of this year’s legislative session, as the budget crisis was beginning to come into full view, both Liias and Fey actively downplayed the idea that the state is focused on, despite the amount of funding within the budget that is allocated to capacity projects and the head of the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) was issuing warnings about continuing to invest in new infrastructure over basic maintenance. Even as the proposed Senate budget allocates more than $2.5 billion over the next six years to highway capacity projects, that hasn’t changed.

“I just fundamentally disagree that we’re expanding the highway network,” Liias said this week. “The one greenfield highway that’s being proposed — the two — are the Gateway Program and North Spokane Corridor. Those were projects that were initiated 10 years ago, and we’re in the last stages of them. I don’t propose that we do those sorts of projects in other parts of the state.”

As other states, like Colorado, have begun to calculate climate costs on their new highway projects and shift resources to greener projects, Liias defended the way that Washington builds highways.

“We, in the environmental review of projects, are looking at the impacts they have in terms of congestion and adding induced demand,” Liias said. “We’re looking at the impacts in terms of capacity for various users of various types. We’re doing that because of the HEAL Act. We’re doing environment justice review, which is not just thinking about the impacts on adjacent communities, but also who are the overburdened and vulnerable communities that haven’t been consulted or engaged?”

But the existing system allows WSDOT to conduct environmental review on its own projects, doesn’t allow for any outside agency to confirm that the state’s highway projects are in alignment with state climate goals. The recent environmental review of the Interstate Bridge Replacement — the most expensive highway project in Pacific Northwest history — completely omitted the issue of induced demand, the concept that a widened highway will fill up with traffic, cancelling out any benefit in travel time that was gained by expanding it.

The prioritization of widening SR 18 also raised questions about the assertion that Washington is being data-driven with its decision making.

While agreement between the twin budgets is set to be hammered out over the next month, all signs point to the legislature continuing to focus on a small number of highway capacity projects, to the detriment of broader state goals. Even a major budget crisis has not yet been enough to prompt a rethinking.

Legislature Considers Cutting Highway Expansion Projects to Address Budget Woes

Facing Budget Crisis, Washington’s Leaders Downplay Focus on Highway Expansion

The post State Budget Proposals Focus on Highway Expansion in Both Chambers first appeared on The Urbanist.

Something is in the air. Unseen. Vibrating. Friscalating. Between A Message from the Stars, City of Six Moons, and Out of Sorts, it almost seems like we’re being prepared for some grand task, an entire species press-ganged into the labor of translating alien missives.

Or maybe I just really like first contact stories.

Signal, created by the design collective Jasper Beatrix, bears a singular honor. This is the best of the recent spate of games about communicating with aliens. But more than that, it’s a game I’ve delayed writing about so I could play it over and over again, reveling in its unparalleled sense of experimentation and discovery.

It begins with the appearance of an alien.

Illustrated by Cricks Rose, the twenty-five extraterrestrial bodies included in Signal are more silhouettes than profiles. They remind me slightly of Stephen Gammell’s nightmare-inducing images from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, suggesting peristalsing appendages and inhuman trunks. Unlike Gammell’s illustrations, however, Rose’s approach is more curious than horrifying. One horned beast, furred along the edges, seems to sport ordinary legs until on closer inspection it becomes apparent that the creature’s head is also its abdomen is also its mode of conveyance. Another adorns itself with burning candles, whether decorative or natural. Yet another radiates like a glow-worm, but in such a way that suggests its gleaming outline is merely a stripe of something larger.

While an alien’s appearance offers the first glimpse into its behavior, there are clues aplenty yet to discover. By the conclusion of a ten-to-thirty-minute session, hopefully you’ll even know what some of those clues are.

Signal is a cooperative game. One player takes on the role of the alien. Everybody else, from one to however many people you can cram around a table, constitute a panel of experts. That’s right. “Experts.” In which field? How do you staff such a panel? It’s anybody’s guess. The obvious option is linguists, but there’s no reason to hold back. In our sessions, we’ve fielded translators and mathematicians and artists. My friend Adam plays the videographer, snapping still images of the panel’s experiments and recording videos of the alien’s responses. Recording is explicitly permitted by the rules, and good thing, too. Those videos have staved off misunderstandings on more than one occasion.

Unlike City of Six Moons, which offered the commonality of written language to fall back on, or A Message from the Stars, which saw alien and human bantering words back and forth, Signal begins where all bridges between cultures lay their actual groundwork: pointing to sticks and rocks and listening to what your opposite party has to say.

Really, that isn’t too far off. The experts have an assortment of triangles, cubes, rods, and discs in two colors at their disposal. They arrange these shapes on a fabric mat according to any logic of their choosing. Together, apart, touching, stacked, piled atop the mat’s test-pattern leylines — anything goes.

And then the alien responds. It moves shapes. It removes some and adds others. Perhaps it stacks one piece atop another. The objective, for both experts and alien alike, is to alter the experiment until it resembles a certain predetermined arrangement. Maybe three triangles next to each other. A rod atop a disc. Something like that.

One of the great strengths of playing Signal, as opposed to the (frankly dull) call-and-response exchanges of A Message from the Stars, is the stark degree of latitude entrusted to both sides of these conversations. As the panel of experts, you need to prompt the alien to create the right pattern, but you’re given total control over the starting parameters of each experiment. Those early moments are overwhelming, each experiment producing what seems like random noise, until little by little you begin to feel out the shape of the rules governing the alien’s behavior.

Speaking of which, the alien’s rules may be ironclad, but this is a melty, bendy alloy of iron. Every alien is given three separate rules. Early on, only the first rule applies. Later the second rule is added, and then the third. I won’t spoil anything, but a rule might be something like “Remove any black cubes touching a line.” Later, once the experts have successfully mastered that first edict, another is appended: “Push apart any touching triangles.” Eventually, a third rule appears: “Place a disc atop any cube not touching a rod, then remove any rods.” That sort of thing.

This entire process is quietly brilliant. Both sides are bound by the alien’s rules, but there’s a surprising degree of leeway in how the alien can execute them, not to mention how the experts interpret what they’ve witnessed. The result is something like conversational frisson. Even when both sides understand the gist of what the other is doing, little inconsistencies or misunderstandings tend to accumulate in the wake of each experiment.

I’ll give an example. Let’s say my alien is operating on a simple rule. “Stack a disc on top of any two touching cubes.” Easy, right?

Except you, as our resident expert, might place two cubes side by side, one black and one white, and watch me add a black disc to the top of those cubes. What should you take away from that? Maybe you will deduce the correct rule immediately. But the rule might have instead been “Cover any differently-colored pieces with a black disc.” Or, crud, even “Stack a disc on top of any other piece.” Maybe there are outside considerations. “If there is a triangle within the inner circle, place a disc on a piece outside the inner circle.”

The point I’m trying to make is that you aren’t only grappling with the rules, but with the gray areas that surround those rules, with the waffling specificities that govern how those shapes are moved, subtracted, generated, or replaced. This is where a skilled alien can do so much more than follow the rules like some program adhering to lines of code. You’re free to get creative. Are my experts stuck on the idea that two non-matching shapes make a black disc? Okay, I’ll give them a white disc instead. I’ll give them a reason to pause and reevaluate. Consistency is but one key of communication. In the right hands, inconsistency unlocks a fair few doors as well.

The result is a fumbling conversation, absent any real precision or even true understanding, and I mean that entirely as a compliment. More than once, I’ve watched a team of experts “successfully” commune with their alien, only to laugh themselves silly when they heard the rules they were ostensibly interfacing with.

That might sound like a weakness, but it’s no more a problem than speaking a language without being able to fully explain its grammatical rules. That’s the beauty of this thing we call communication. It’s enough to know that certain words hit the ear right. If you hear somebody reading Red Riding Hood and immediately launch into an explanation about how ablaut reduplication is an acceptable exception to proper adjective order, everyone in your kid’s kindergarten class is going to stare at you like some bug-eyed nerd. And they would be right. You would be a bug-eyed nerd to care that much about apophony. Just let the vibes wash over you, man.

Okay, enough of that. This is the second time I’ve been deeply impressed by Jasper Beatrix. The collective’s previous title, Typeset, also produced surprising heft despite its tiny box and twenty-minute duration. Signal is even stronger than Typeset, a commendable achievement indeed. I can’t wait to see what these folks get up to next. More immediately, I can’t wait to hold another fireside chat with the rest of these aliens.

 

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A complimentary copy of Signal was provided by the publisher.

From reader Rob Coberly, an article that seems like it was ripped right out of the pre-worldbuilding stage of my novel Arctic Rising: Canada Just Checked Trump’s Ego: Carney’s Super-Corridor Sets Stage for a Global Power Shift Without America.

“Carney’s masterstroke is a National Energy/Shipping/Travel/Digital Corridor, a coast-to-coast-to-Arctic strategy to unite the country like never before… This isn’t just a pipeline or a highway—it’s everything. Imagine a multimodal lifeline spanning 7,000+ km—road, rail, pipelines, power lines, fiber-optic cables—all in one corridor. That’s the vision. The concept has been called a “visionary project that could unlock extraordinary economic potential.

Now, it’s government policy.

Carney outlined a First Mile Fund to connect remote energy sites to the grid of roads and rails. There will be no more stranded resources; if we dig it up or pump it out, we’ll ship it out. A “one-window” approval process will blitz through red tape for nation-building projects while still upholding top safety and environmental standards. For once, Canada is acting with wartime urgency in peacetime—because economically, Trump declared war on us. Well, game on.

If Canada stays pro-immigration and does this, in addition to a boost in GDP, they will position themselves well. Mark Carney holding a snap election soon is smart as well.

Crossing fingers for them.