The Los Angeles region once again topped the list of areas with the worst traffic congestion for the sixth year in a row, according to a report by INRIX, a company that specializes in car services and transportation analytics.

Drivers in and around Los Angeles spent 102 hours battling traffic congestion during peak hours in 2017, INRIX's said. By contrast, New York City motorists spent 91 hours battling peak-hour congestion. New York was No. 3 on the INRIX list. No. 2 was Moscow. — Los Angeles Times

[...] the ever increasing mallification of our environment threatens to undermine the public common ground on which our societies were founded: public places should address an abstract, inclusive notion of the public, instead of a defined, limited, and exclusive (in the literal sense of the word) audience. Conversely, we should not confuse or conflate trite stores (even if they place trees inside and call themselves town squares) to be an ersatz public domain. — Failed Architecture

The council housing designed 50 years ago for a progressive London borough remains a potent symbol of the achievements of postwar social democracy. — Places Journal

[...] Penn State landscape architecture professor Timothy Baird and architecture professor José Duarte taught a new studio that engaged students in the study of one Brazilian favela via virtual reality (VR) technology. The studio, which paired architecture students with landscape architecture students, posited VR as a proxy for expensive site visits. “Developing countries can’t always afford consultants because of the distance and difficulty to travel,” says Baird [...] — Landscape Architecture Magazine

Now that it’s down to a final list, Amazon says that it plans to “dive deeper into their proposals” and evaluate whether these locations can actually support the company’s plan to add up to 50,000 jobs. The final list is full of mostly expected choices. Amazon is looking primarily at major metro areas with lots of people, transit options, and access to airports. — The Verge

Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP) and Aedas today unveiled their involvement in a boundary crossing which will provide a new entry point into Hong Kong.

The Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge Hong Kong Boundary Crossing Facilities (HKBCF) is a joint project between the two architects, working with AECOM, which will provide new connections between Hong Kong, mainland China, and Macao, and which will bring wider benefits across the Pearl River Delta. — Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners

The prevalence of gated communities may also reveal what South Africans think constitutes middle class life. As it did under apartheid, it often means avoiding the poor unless they are servants, nannies or gardeners. Instead of creating racial segregation, gated communities often broaden the economic gap in South Africa and restricts development to privatized progress. — Quartz

I’d been assigned to write a story about Pennsylvania Station, but I wanted to get a caboose-eye view of the decaying tunnels leading up to it, because the only imaginable way the station could be any worse is if it were underwater. Penn, the Western Hemisphere’s busiest train station, serves 430,000 travelers every weekday—more than LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark airports combined. — Bloomberg Businessweek

Yet what has drawn the most concern and curiosity with regards to Quayside is a uniquely 21st-century feature: a data-harvesting, wifi-beaming “digital layer” that would underpin each proposed facet of Quayside life. According to Sidewalk Labs, this would provide “a single unified source of information about what is going on”—to an astonishing level of detail—as well as a centralized platform for efficiently managing it all. — City Lab

The postwar passion for highway construction saw cities around the world carved up in the name of progress. But as communities fought back many schemes were abandoned – their half-built traces showing what might have been — The Guardian

Last week, HUD published a notice in the Federal Register announcing its intentions to suspend enforcement of the rule until 2020, the New York Times reports. The notice “tells cities already at work on the detailed plans required by the rule that they no longer need to submit them, and the department says it will stop reviewing plans that have already been filed,” according to the paper. — NextCity