Liberal Talk Radio

Iraqis fall in love with the Lionel-Industrial Complex: The service between Baghdad and Basra resumed with little fanfare in December after a hiatus of 18 months. Few dared use it at first, but word has spread of a safe and cheap journey, and railway officials are scrambling for funds for more carriages. “There’s been a [...]

Flexcar was a much better name. The name described the service, no explanation really necessary. On the other hand, Flexcar’s logo looked like someone who had been run over, which seems like a mixed message.

Yesterday I linked to a Bob Herbert column that argued for more federal funding for infrastructure, and used Minneapolis’ collapsed I-35W bridge as its central example. Well, this article in today’s NYT says the bridge died of a design flaw, not neglect: The conventional wisdom is that the Interstate 35W bridge, aged and due for [...]

Good Bob Herbert column today: We appear to have forgotten the lessons of history. Time and again an economic boom has followed periods of sustained infrastructure improvement. It’s impossible to calculate all of the benefits from (to mention just a few) the Erie Canal, which connected the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean and helped [...]

A new study purports to demonstrate that in many cases, wealthy individuals are incentivized to use public transit: An interesting snippet: Alternatively, if Wrich * F < C then some rich people will take public transportation. In this case, a four ring city can be one outcome. In the inner ring, the rich take public [...]

Remember how the American car makers fought increased fuel efficiency increases tooth and nail? Apparently the executives and lobbyists don’t talk much to the R&D departments.

Flexcar users now must pay exorbinant rental car taxes. It’s a funny unintended consequence: taxes on rental cars and hotel lodging are supposed to be gimmes for local governments: you get to tax tourists who can’t vote! But all of a sudden Flexcar has created a whole class of renter-constitutents, and it’s exposing the whole [...]

Or, what happens when people who think snarky=intelligent spend too much time in a room alone together, drunk. The Strangler urges a no vote for Rail: Sound Transit/RTID Proposition No. 1 VOTE NO The joint roads and transit ballot measure shackles expansion of Sound Transit’s popular light-rail system to a massive roads- expansion package that [...]

Great article on ways in which the airline industry is incredibly stupid. I can only add that I, too, would be more than willing to pay a modest additional sum for some extra service and a few more inches of legroom.

Since Bruno won’t let me post anything inflammatory on OrphanRoad, I’ll have to go off on the Seattle Times here.  Their headline today: “Should You Trust Sound Transit?” You’re all smart people, so I won’t bore you with a discussion of the semiotics of this statement (basically, by asking the question, it sets up a [...]