Current Today is bcdW Magazine's daily newsletter — one story, one city, read through the eyes of the world.

We launch today in test flight. Each edition takes a single real story from one of our cities and asks: what does this mean for someone living somewhere else entirely? What ideas travel? What collaborations become possible?
Let’s get into it →

Today, Florence banned shared e-scooters entirely. The city made the decision clearly, implemented it cleanly, and replaced the scooters with a fleet of 4,000 bicycles. The logic was simple: the scooters weren't safe, the city couldn't enforce the rules, so the city ended the experiment and moved on.

San Francisco has been running the same experiment — bikes, scooters, e-bikes, shared mobility of every kind — for years. It has not ended it. It has not fixed it. It has added more options, created more regulation, issued more permits, and watched the sidewalks become more chaotic, not less.

This is San Francisco's specific urban disease: the inability to finish a decision.

Consider the Salesforce Transit Center — a $2.2 billion building completed in 2018 and cracked two months after opening. It took years to fully repair, and by the time it reopened, the commuter patterns it was designed to serve had shifted permanently to remote work. The building is beautiful. The neighborhood around it still doesn't know what it is.

Consider the Vacant to Vibrant program — the city's attempt to fill empty storefronts by lowering barriers for local entrepreneurs. The program exists. The storefronts are still largely empty. The capital that would allow entrepreneurs to actually take advantage of the lower barriers doesn't exist at scale.

Consider the bike lane network — among the most extensive in any American city, and still contested at almost every expansion point by a combination of parking advocates, merchant associations, and neighborhood groups that have been fighting the same fight for a decade.

San Francisco is a city that knows what good urban policy looks like — it can point to the research, cite the examples, commission the studies. What it cannot do is implement. Florence didn't commission a study. It made a call.

The question San Francisco should be sitting with is not whether it has the right ideas. It does. The question is whether it has the institutional capacity to act on them before the ideas become irrelevant.

(Sources: Florence Daily News, SF Planning Department, CoStar — March–April 2026)

New York — New York has its own version of this problem. The city is simultaneously the most ambitious urban policy laboratory in the United States and the most effective at defeating its own ambitions. Congestion pricing was studied for decades, passed into law, survived legal challenges — and then suspended by the governor hours before implementation. The bike lane network has expanded dramatically, but every major corridor is still a political negotiation. New York and San Francisco share the same pathology: world-class ideas, world-class obstruction. The difference is that New York is larger and therefore more able to absorb its own dysfunction. San Francisco is small enough that the dysfunction is the whole story.

Seoul — Seoul's approach to urban mobility decisions is instructive. When the city decided to restore the Cheonggyecheon stream by removing an elevated highway, it did so over the objections of merchants, commuters, and traffic engineers — and completed the project in two years. When Seoul decided to create scooter-free zones in Hongdae and Banpo, it announced the policy, ran an educational period, and began enforcement. The decision was made and executed. Seoul doesn’t always get the policy right, but it has the institutional capacity to act on a decision once it's made. San Francisco has the ideas. Seoul has the follow-through.

Medellín — Medellín's urban transformation was built on exactly the kind of decisive implementation that San Francisco struggles with. The cable cars, the escalators, the library parks — none of these were built by consensus. They were built by a city government that decided the city needed them and found the political will to build them. Medellín in the 1990s faced far more severe constraints than San Francisco faces today — violence, poverty, institutional collapse — and still managed to execute. The constraint San Francisco faces is not resources or ideas. It is political will applied to specific decisions over a sustained period.

Austin — Austin is at the stage San Francisco was fifteen years ago: rapid growth, rising rents, a transit system being built from scratch, and a set of urban policy debates that are just beginning. The lesson Austin should take from San Francisco is not what to do — it is what happens when a city is very good at starting things and very bad at finishing them. Project Connect is Austin's chance to build transit infrastructure that actually reshapes the city. The risk is that it becomes another decade-long debate that produces infrastructure optimized for the debate rather than for the city.

Dallas — Dallas has the opposite problem from San Francisco. Where SF is paralyzed by process, Dallas has historically made large urban decisions quickly and with little community input — which is how it ended up with highways through historically Black neighborhoods and a downtown that emptied out for decades. The FIFA World Cup is forcing Dallas to think about its public realm in ways it hasn’t before. What Dallas needs is not less decision-making speed but more deliberation about which decisions actually serve the city long-term. San Francisco is the cautionary tale for too much deliberation. Dallas is the cautionary tale for too little.

Tokyo — Tokyo’s urban decisions are made through a dense web of government agencies, private developers, and community associations — a process that looks slow from the outside but produces remarkably coherent outcomes. This week’s wave of station-district openings — Oimachi Tracks, MoN Takanawa, Tokyo Dream Park — were each years in the making but arrived on schedule and fully formed. Tokyo’s secret is not speed. It is the ability to make a decision stick once it’s made. San Francisco can make a decision. What it can’t do is make it stick.

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Where Will the Olds Live When Everything Changes? We're All Getting There. Today's Old Is Tomorrow's Ours.

We are getting older. All of us. Faster than we planned, longer than we expected, in cities that were never designed for this. Climate is changing everything — heat, water, food, safety. And at the same time, the oldest generation in human history is growing larger, living longer, and asking a question no city has fully answered yet: where do we belong in all of this? Sim Eternal is the project building that story — not as a warning, not as a policy paper, but as a living narrative about the future city told by the people who will live in it the longest. The olds are not the problem. They are the point. And this city is theirs.

→ Visit Sim Eternal City Project

Current runs on one city, one story, every day. But the map is still being drawn.

We are looking for contributors who live and work inside the cities they write about — one story from your city, told the way only a local can tell it. We are also looking for readers who want to add their voice to other cities' stories — benchmarking, similar cases, collaboration ideas, a connection worth making. If a story from Medellín reminds you of something happening in your city, tell us. That response is the whole point.

Right now we are building across the Americas and Asia. But the dream is longer than that — from America to Afro-Eurasia, local to local, city to city, one real connection at a time.

More stories. More cities. More continents.

If you have one, send it.

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