"On my way home from work two Thursdays ago, the No. 3 train I was riding stopped suddenly, just before the 72nd Street station.This, on the New York City subway, was not particularly unusual. But what happened afterward was."
“Ladies and gentlemen,” began the voice over the loudspeaker, sounding rattled. “I have bad news. A passenger just jumped in front of the train.”
Several people gasped. A woman near me jerked her head up from her phone, wearing an expression of horror. We riders did something not normally acceptable: We made eye contact with one another. A train conductor or operator speaking of a death on the tracks without euphemism: We had never heard that before."
"On this day in 1978, three teenage girls die after their 1973 Ford Pinto is rammed from behind by a van and bursts into flames on an Indiana highway. The fatal crash was one of a series of Pinto accidents that caused a national scandal during the 1970s."
"Spend a good amount of time driving, especially in rural areas, and you've probably noticed those messy-looking black squiggles that cut across asphalt road surfaces in what seems like haphazard fashion. But rest assured that they're not simply the result of some sloppy tar work by a road crew that decided to have a few beers before the end of the shift."
"Instead, what you're noticing is crack sealing. It's a time-honored technique for remedying the damaged road surfaces, without inflicting even more pain upon taxpayers by tearing up and repaving the entire road."
"In practical terms, though, we’re ages from getting there. Why? As security researchers at the University of Washington discovered, as smart as partially autonomous technology is, it’s a long ways from being smart enough to operate a vehicle in anything but perfect conditions, and it’s easy to throw that technology into turmoil. Sometimes with as little as a sticker placed on a stop sign."
"While politicians hold the purse strings, it's those on the transit agencies' boards who dictate how the systems operate."
"Board members for the two counties' agencies — Hillsborough Area Regional Transit Authority and Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority — are a mix of elected officials and community members."
"None of them rely on the bus for work, errands or their personal life."
"This isn't unique to Tampa Bay, or transit. Many boards are composed of people who don't use the service they help provide. But in a region roiled by transportation problems, it's worth knowing who sits on these boards and what philosophies they bring to the conversation."
I have to agree strongly with Interstate 68 through Cumberland, Maryland. That is a cluster -- you drop from 70 MPH and make a hard 40 MPH left turn after descending a steep hill. Then throw in a bunch of city traffic merging on and exiting the interstate. It's so bad they've built massive concrete walls, so that when big rigs crash, they won't hopefully burn all of the downtown.
"The recent trumpist trumpeting about the plans of Chinese manufacturer Foxconn to open a manufacturing facility in Wisconsin omitted a few key details -- like the fact that Foxconn is being given a sweetheart tax-break that's topped up with 15 years' worth of guarantees of up to $200m/year in cash subsidies at taxpayer expense -- a record-setting taxpayer subsidy that exceeds the previous Wisconsin record-holder by a factor of fifty."
"The total bill for this incentive package that Wisconsin is giving the super-profitable Chinese manufacturer? Three billion dollars."
"But there's more! Wisconsin cities will also have to provide incentives, including hundreds of millions more in infrastructure, and exemptions on environmental rules that will allow Foxconn to pollute watersheds, drain water habitats, and reengineer Wisconsin's freshwater sources, up to and including Lake Michigan."