Saturday, April 26, 2008

Shout-Out

My friend Rustin has (finally!) started a blog of his own. It's called From Streetcars to Spaceships. A few choice samples:

A Smoking Gun In The Hands of the Transit Monopolists:
I found a stack of old newspapers at an estate sale last weekend. One from right about the end of World War II caught my eye. I think that what I found is pretty damn important since it documents a transit monopoly that isn't in the much-discussed Snell Report. ... I'm hoping that by posting this sort of thing I can shed a bit more light on what really created our current appalling situation. (This relates directly to my Streetcar Series, linked in the sidebar, for what it's worth.)

I walk. That shouldn't be a problem.
Move transit stops closer to destinations. As with cabs, most pedestrians also use buses and having the bus or the MAX stop allllll the way at the far edge of a mall or, say, the Portland Expo Center just adds one more impediment to leaving the car at home. Why should access for transit only be put out past the furthest possible space beyond the worst possible parking spots?

Jet packs -- some history to think about
Allegedly one day during the Nixon administration a couple of folks from the White House just showed up at the project and said, "as of now you're all reassigned. Your work is all classified; you're now funded. ... Welcome to the cruise missile program." And so the jetpack project morphed into cruise missile engine work and the original project got uncreated.

He's also been a mad posting maniac lately, so watch for lots of activity there (unlike the kind of output you get out of Your Humble But Poky Narrator).

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Why, thank you. It's been fun finally diving into the blogging life. I just put another short essay up a little while ago. I've got so much that I've been wanting to say that I suspect it will be a while yet before the outpouring of content stops. I hope that you folks enjoy it.

-Rustin

3:24 AM  

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