January

Washington State made transit fare-free for everyone 18 and under in 2021, and the results are striking: nearly 15 million youth trips in 2023, plus another 1.5 million on the ferries. Agencies paired the free fares with outreach — classroom visits, field trips, and bus-riding lessons — so kids actually knew how to use the system.

Lorin Hochstein stages a short play in which an engineering manager discovers the “carefulness knob” — the dial a team implicitly turns when deciding how much testing and process rigor a change deserves. The punchline is that cranking it to maximum doesn’t eliminate incidents, it just pushes delivery dates out exponentially, and teams are far worse at estimating risk than anyone would like to admit.