The Curious Engineer

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Max Mautner

maxmautner.com

San Mateo-based urbanist, software-engineer, and fully vested in changing how we build cities.

Society / politics / economyEssays / personal

’15’16’17’18’19’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
189 from 22 Dec 2015 to 5 Nov 2026
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weekly (53 in the last year)
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personal blog
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2026 47

  1. Bay Area transit gets an efficiency review. The 101 express lanes never got one.
  2. Speed and red light cameras save lives. They survive politics only when the tickets are fair.
  3. Since 2010, California’s roads carry 7% less traffic per resident and kill 91% more people on foot
  4. Burlingame's city government collects 1.7x as much revenue per resident as San Mateo's. Here's what it spends it on.
  5. 2 tools for asking San Mateo for safer streets
  6. The Bay Area will pay more to bail out America's highways than to keep its own trains and buses running
  7. The years Americans outlive driving
  8. Who lives without a car in the Bay Area
  9. Things I wish I had known about kickscooters
  10. How fast is a car, after you pay for it?
  11. Driving 5 mph slower beats driving 5% less
  12. 1 in 4 new California homes is in someone's backyard
  13. When we talk about traffic violence
  14. Too many roads
  15. A stop sign for $1,000
  16. Killing someone with a car costs $1.6 million. California requires drivers to carry $30,000
  17. Paying for driving
  18. A scooter is cheating, a cargo bike is rude, the car is fine
  19. If there's a war on cars in the USA then the cars have won
  20. Key Biscayne, Florida
  21. Kirby Cove Camping
  22. Aspen visit
  23. Moving Car-Free as a Parent
  24. Voting with Feet
  25. This is Where You Belong
  26. My neighbor handed me a speeding survey. Then she told me people my age want her dead.
  27. Moving at Human Speed
  28. The Trailer Gap
  29. Downtown San Mateo Is a Monument to Insider Self-Dealing
  30. YIMBY data projects, between naps
  31. Lessons From 6 Years of Local Advocacy
  32. It's Not a Values Crisis, It's a Housing Crisis.
  33. Does Prop 13 explain California's relatively lower birth rates?
  34. Most People Who Ride Bikes Have Soft Tires
  35. Prop 13 Didn't Shrink Government. It Handed It to Sacramento.
  36. The Declining Driver's License: Good, Bad, or Both?
  37. The e-bike regulation gap is closing
  38. The Scooter and the Bike
  39. Most People Who Ride Bikes Have No Idea How to Shift Gears
  40. Yes, Your Bike Can Carry That
  41. What I Stopped Thinking About When I Went Car-Free
  42. Why I Don't Drive
  43. What If California Is the Most Regressive State in America?
  44. Closing Streets to Cars Helps Business. It Works in Small Towns Too
  45. Buc-ee's Is Better at Placemaking Than Your City
  46. What Happens to Business When You Close a Street to Cars
  47. The War on Drugs is Why Your Bus Never Showed Up

2025 30

  1. Graz Photo Map
  2. San Mateo Photo Bike Ride
  3. Milan Photo Map
  4. Miami Photo Map
  5. Come and See
  6. Vulnerability and Ivan Illich
  7. The Voter Who Can’t Drive
  8. Two Wheels in Europe
  9. Commute by Running
  10. SF Library
  11. SF Opera
  12. Lake Tahoe
  13. June Daily Photos
  14. SFO Descent
  15. The Bus
  16. Boonville, CA
  17. Temple Emanu-El
  18. San Mateo-San Francisco walk
  19. Child Portage
  20. Bike to Work 2025
  21. Bike videography
  22. A new project
  23. San Jose-LA Amtrak
  24. San Pablo Reservoir
  25. Caltrain to Golden Gate Park
  26. Polacon San Francisco
  27. Southern France, Pt. 3
  28. Southern France, Pt. 2
  29. Southern France, Pt. 1
  30. Visiting the Miami Library

2024 24

  1. My commute
  2. Tiburon sans car
  3. SamTrans tour
  4. Benches
  5. SLO by Amtrak
  6. The Homevoter Hypothesis
  7. If you care about safety, ride an e-bike
  8. Fifield-Cahill Ridge Trail
  9. Sony RX100 VI 📸
  10. Food photos over the years
  11. Traveling to Santa Rosa
  12. Berlin visit
  13. Saturday Bike Camping
  14. Conservatives & Bikes
  15. Purisima Creek
  16. Half Moon Bay
  17. Amtrak: Seattle-San Jose
  18. Muni 30 Bus
  19. Bike Camping
  20. Coyote Point
  21. YIMBY Prom
  22. E-Scooters: First Thoughts
  23. How I Bike to the Airport
  24. Portals

2023 13

  1. Visit to Newport Beach
  2. Bike Summit 2023
  3. Visit to San Diego
  4. BART with Mike
  5. Rayban Stories
  6. Folding bikes or no?
  7. Car Country
  8. Writing Without Bullshit
  9. The Moral Imperative for Bike Lanes
  10. Biking to Work
  11. First Anniversary
  12. Legion of Honor
  13. Running Injuries

2022 8

  1. Why I bicycle
  2. A Los Angeles commute
  3. Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone
  4. Post-9/11 Conflict
  5. Half Moon Bay
  6. Onsite
  7. An updated goal list
  8. Early life lessons

2021 18

  1. Saying thank you
  2. San Mateo County History Museum
  3. Alternative experiment protocols
  4. Podcasting workshop
  5. Being Ignored & Building Software
  6. Screenshare iOS to Zoom, Meet
  7. Chrome Productivity
  8. Chrome extensions I use
  9. Jekyll + Emails
  10. Improving Audio
  11. Content Marketing Tips
  12. How I Got My Jobs
  13. How To Do Logging In Python
  14. Notes on remote work
  15. Gift Giving
  16. It's all Legacy Code
  17. Power
  18. Daniil Dubov

2020 11

  1. Technical Writing, the Google course
  2. Tech Interview Gauntlet
  3. USB Footpad Review
  4. A Conversation with Ben Jacobson
  5. Live-Streaming Site in 30 Mins
  6. Pay remote workers a premium
  7. Interrotron
  8. 30 Days to Backend Software Engineer
  9. 18% of Github Projects Have CI
  10. Google Docs to Markdown
  11. McCarthy vs. Roosevelt

2019 17

  1. Building a Home Gym
  2. A Newbie's Guide to Digital Art
  3. Netflix DVD automation vids
  4. My current curiosities
  5. The Case Interview (of Software Engineering)
  6. OSI Layer Notes
  7. Java Primer for Python Developers
  8. The Morning Paper - Testing
  9. The Morning Paper - Virtual Machines
  10. How to Run Pandas' Test Suite
  11. Defining Runway
  12. mypy, the Optional Static Type-Checker for Python
  13. Make your own Google Analytics
  14. 10 Lessons from Magic the Gathering
  15. Better than the news
  16. Why weightlifting?
  17. An Optimized Alternative to RTFM

2018 13

  1. Take a Break Ya Dingus!
  2. The Zero-Indexed Stock Market
  3. Software engineer? Start a podcast.
  4. How to Survive the Graveyard Shift
  5. Making Markets, Pawn Shops, and Farmer Joe
  6. The Declaration of Independence
  7. Querying Access Logs on AWS
  8. Entry-Level Software Engineering QnA
  9. Some more iPad weightlifting sketches
  10. Static Websites on Google Cloud
  11. Weightlifting sketches
  12. Why use Docker locally?
  13. Static Site Hosting on AWS

2017 4

  1. The Net Present Value of Content
  2. Information Asymmetries and Paying it Forward
  3. Tumblr to Jekyll
  4. The Accidental Engineer

2016 1

  1. Generative Text Models

2015 3

  1. github-email-thief
  2. Make Your Own Gmail
  3. Modern anti-spam and E2E crypto