Worldwide links: The most fooling

We hope you enjoyed our April Fool’s coverage Friday! Like every year, dreaming these up and writing them is a fun break from the pace of everyday issues and a chance to poke a little fun at ourselves along with others. A lot of other folks came up with their own great April Fools. Here are some of our favorites.

Share the runway: Recognizing that it doesn’t accommodate other modes, the Royal Air Force base in Shawbury, England announced it has added a bike lane on its formerly airplane-only runway. Nice.

Pedestrian freedom, Texas-style: City Observatory had a great riff on the biannual, headline-generating, methodologically-poor Texas A&M traffic study that ranks cities not on how quickly people get to work but how fast they drive to get there.

Joe Cortright, the author of one of the major debunking studies, turned the issue around for April Fool’s. If the Texas study assumes the goal is to move cars as fast as possible, what about instead measuring cities on how freely pedestrians can walk without having to wait at such pesky things as stoplights? The result: the Pedestrian Pain Index.

Metro’s new service: Reddit user oddrob posted what might be the most extensive Metro fantasy map ever. Wherever you live, your area would probably have service under this amazing map. And we just know Metro has plenty of railcars to run the service.

The best way to talk: GiveWell, which is connected to our funder Open Philanthropy Project, had my favorite of all. A very GiveWell-like writeup explained how they’re embarking on a pilot project to analyze better ways of describing their evidence-based analyses. But you just have to go read the actual “test.”

And…: Silver Spring will landmark all its demolished buildings (Historian4Hire) … The International Space Station goes mixed-use (Strong Towns) … Donald Trump encourages violence against cars. (Alexandria News) … Google builds a self-driving bike.