California's bullet-train agency will officially start construction in Fresno this week on the first 29-mile segment of the system, a symbol of the significant progress the $68-billion project has made against persistent political and legal opposition. [...]

But the milestone marked by Tuesday's groundbreaking ceremony also will serve as a reminder of the enormous financial, technical and political risks still faced by the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco project. — latimes.com

The subterranean settlement was discovered in the Nevşehir province of Turkey’s Central Anatolia region, in the historical area of Cappadocia. [...]

the site, located around the Nevşehir hill fort near the city of Kayseri, appears to dwarf all other finds to date. [...]

The agency has already spent 90 million Turkish liras (£25m) on the development project, but the organisation’s head said he did not see the money spent as a loss due to the magnitude of the historical discovery. — independent.co.uk

Day-to-day life [in Singapore] is famously governed by a series of rules that maintain this clean, well-ordered city. The import of chewing gum is banned, therefore globs of the stuff aren’t found on the street. There are fines for irritating people with a musical instrument or your own drunkenness... The result is a low-crime, scrupulously run city – with none of the incomprehensible, exciting chaos of cities found in neighbouring Indonesia or Malaysia. — the Guardian

A little over a year ago, Seattle sought to determine the quality of TNCs like Uber and Lyft relative to taxi services, and the result was a stinging indictment of traditional taxis' speed, convenience, and ease of payment. [...]

In response to competition from the Ubers and Lyfts of the world, taxi operators across the country have done more than complain about the loss of their monopoly on for-hire transportation ... and actually worked to improve service to be competitive — planetizen.com

In a warren of rooms inside a 400-year-old townhouse on the Essex-Suffolk border, a counter-revolution against the most dramatic rebuilding of the London skyline in decades is gathering strength.

Eschewing computer power for sharp pencils and tracing paper, father and son architect team Quinlan and Francis Terry are drafting classically inspired designs for some of the capital’s most prominent sites in a fightback against plans for hundreds of new skyscrapers. — theguardian.com

By switching off the floodlighting we want to make those on the march stop and think. It is a challenge: consider who you are marching alongside. — theguardian

Two nights before New Year’s Eve, more than a thousand Macedonians gathered in the snow to hold hands and form a ring around a large shopping mall in the capital city of Skopje. That may sound like the beginning to some strange joke, but the crowd was assembled in earnest, to express its love of the modernist building known as GTC, and to protest a government plan to give it a new, baroque façade. — hyperallergic.com

The city estimates that some 4,500 of its total 10,750 sidewalk miles are in disrepair. According to a 2007 USC study, the city repaired a grand total of 64 miles of sidewalks, or 1.4 percent of damaged sidewalks, improving the city’s backlog to 72 years.

The reasons for this civic embarrassment go back even longer than 72 years. They are twofold. One is political, the other arboreal. — nextcity.org

Build better towers, ditch the Lego, outlaw the ‘facadectomy’ – and how about more transparency in Boris’s London? — theguardian.com