Welcome to my new substack blog, a home for some of my writing and presentations particularly on two topics:
bringing livability to urban streets
designing corruption resistant government structures
For my day job, I am the Chairman of Tower Research Capital LLC, one of the leading high frequency trading firms in the world. Tower is a proprietary trading firm that specializes in automated quantitative trading. I was CEO of Tower for over 20 years. Two years ago, I handed over the day to day management responsibilities for the firm to Albert An, and I transitioned to being Chairman. As a proprietary trading firm, Tower makes money trading its own capital. Tower has over 30 independent trading teams and nearly 1,000 employees globally. At Tower, we are not eager to let our competitors know the details of what we do, so I am mostly going to avoid discussing trading on this blog.
For the past 25 years, one of my main passions has been urban livability, the livable streets movement, and the fight to reduce the blight of automobiles in cities. I have been very active in the livable streets movement in New York City. I am the founder and Chairman of Open Plans, a not-for-profit organization whose projects include Streetsblog, Streetfilms, Open Plans Advocacy, and Streetopia UWS. I have also been a longtime supporter of a constellation of organizations that have been working hard to improve biking, walking, transit and public space in New York including Transportation Alternatives, StreetsPAC, Riders Alliance, and the Regional Planning Association among others.
Livable streets advocates in New York have had many great successes over the past 20 years including seeing a huge growth in the size and quality of the bike network, the creation of great public plazas (Times Square, Herald Square, Madison Square, Union Square, etc.), and the expansion of outdoor dining. The following two videos give a sense of our work and the changes it has brought to New York:
I am now pushing the creation of a government framework to manage streets as public spaces and the development of block level democratic structures to allow for the residents of New York to have a meaningful say in how their streets are managed. Many of the posts in this blog will be related to my livable streets advocacy.
Through my work as a livable streets advocate and also my association with Reinvent Albany (of which I am chairman) and its amazing leader, John Kaehny, I have had the opportunity to get to see close up how government in New York City and New York State really functions. I also spent years studying the elite corruption of the U.S. government, and my observations about the endemic corruption at all levels of the U.S. government has led me to think about its structural roots. I have reexamined the fundamental mechanisms of our democracy and developed models for democratic systems designed to be resistant to corruption. I will share more details on these models in future blog posts.