Benjamin Ross / is on Nostr

Transit advocate. Author of Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism. Chair of Maryland Transit Opportunities Coalition. Searchable.

Last Notes

2025-04-29 19:33:16

Just sat through MoCo Council ctee discussion on free fares on the Ride-On bus system.. Very little revenue lost because riders have stopped paying fares. (Enforcement ceased in 2015.)
Turns out that free fares have their own enforcement costs. Other transit agencies that went fare-free found you need "ambassadors" on the buses to deter anti-social behavior on the buses, which deters ridership.

2025-04-15 17:33:50

Ten leading American Jewish groups, including the umbrella organizations for Reform and Conservative rabbis, denounce Trump crackdown on students & universities.
“We unequivocally condemn the exploitation of our community’s real concerns about antisemitism to undermine democratic norms and rights.”
https://rac.org/press-room/urj-joins-coalition-jewish-organizations-rejecting-false-choice-between-jewish-safety

2025-04-12 20:19:26

A parking lot where homeless people live in their cars, but only let in if they work in town. Story reflects so many thiings wrong in US:
* Housing shortage so bad that workers with decent jobs can't afford rent.
* Land use & transport systems that make a car more necessary than a home.
* Working class needs a pass from an employer to live in town, an echo of Soviet & Chinese totalitarianism.
* In 2 of 3 towns where tried, nimbys shut down this form of affordable housing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/realestate/colorado-homeless-parking-lot-affordable-housing.html?unlocked_article_code=1._E4.b8on.qeAnwZxngK39&smid=url-share

2025-04-08 01:07:01

Trump administration folds on NYC congestion pricing. It will continue unless opponents win their legal case -- which was how things stood before they intervened.
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nyc-congestion-pricing-mta-trump-administration-deal/

2025-04-06 18:36:27

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@nprofile…9wrc Hopefully the people in the other faction would like to wall off those crazies too. But in my experience, they often need encouragement. There's much too much of a no-enemies-to-the-left attitude floating around, and people who feel discomfort with their own crazies tend to shy away from discomfiting them and instead just drop out.
If you clearly state a positive program that distinguishes you from the crazies, things usually won't evolve into a need to confront them directly.

2025-04-06 16:41:39

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@nprofile…9wrc It's not enough to just ignore them. You need to define your own objectives & the objectives of your action in clear, positive terms that distinguish yourselves from the crazies. Unwillingness to offend them ultimately drives away more people than it attracts.

2025-03-11 22:40:29

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@nprofile…9wrc This uses a single measure of ideology. For Democrats, there's lots of evidence that populist positions on economics are *more* persuasive than moderate positions, while the opposite is true for cultural issues. Using a single scale for ideology in this situation yields no useful guidance and risks misidentifying turnout & persuasion effects.

2025-02-27 15:38:38

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@nprofile…9wrc The coding shifted in the late 60s and 70s due to combined effect of (1) revelation of the very real distortions of official science by powerful public & private actors (eg, lead toxicology, pesticide science, A-bomb testing fallout) & (2) hostility to science as such in the 1960s counterculture and "new age" movements (coded left). 2/2

2025-02-27 15:31:56

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@nprofile…9wrc In the 1950s & 60s, hostility to modern medicine was strongly coded right-wing. The far right led a very active anti-fluoridation movement. There was a widely listened-to quack medicine talk show on the radio in NY. Recall the line in Dr Strangelove about "the international communist conspiracy to sap and destroy all of our precious bodily fluids." 1/2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1KvgtEnABY

2025-02-19 14:11:54

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@nprofile…9wrc @nprofile…cnkj
Why the liberal-bashing here? "Establishing the Founder’s intent, or simply repeating the way the existing institutions function, often suffices to establish the legitimacy of a particular outcome" is not "in the minds of many liberals." Original intent is a doctrine made up by conservatives to overturn the work of the New Deal and Warren courts. The legalist Democrats in Congresss aren't the liberals, they are the pro-corporate right wing of the party.

2025-01-16 13:43:28

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@nprofile…kz3p @nprofile…9wrc My grandmother had another way of saying it: "If enough money passes through your fingers, some of it will stick."

2024-12-30 13:12:31

Waymo (aka Google) admits that it trains its robotaxis to break the law. When WaPo reporter finds robotaxis fail to stop for pedestrians in marked crosswalk 70% of the time, Waymo says it follows "social norms" rather than laws.
Expert explains: When robotaxis obey law, they don't go fast enough to compete successfully with Uber, so Google execs ordered engineers to ignore laws.
https://wapo.st/3ZZDifm

2023-11-05 12:44:53

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@npub1lse…5d80
No, the situation would not have been the same, with 240 hostages in Gaza. Hamas using those hostages to demand concessions to undermine the Israeli-Saudi rapprochement, if the Saudis had any further interest in it anyway after seeing what they would consider an exhibition of Israeli weakness.
And you don't think it would have been taken by Hezbollah as an invitatioin to do the same thing?