Ben Chambers

I assume at this age you also have an interest in Steely Dan and I would suggest enjoying the Venn Diagram of those interests, which is “Only a Fool Would Say That”

I think it’s more of the second one

This “punching left” take is bad and dumb and you are way better when you punch cars

I’d love to see you direct your ire against fare free transit turned toward elected officials who talk a big game but don’t actually deliver on transit investments, so that we can have good things like both fare free and expanded transit

The sweeper for the Mall can fit in the bridge lanes but it’s right there so it’s no problem. If protected lanes go anywhere that isn’t next to the Mall, it’s a problem with transporting the sweeper

My full dream options for lunch that don’t exist on the downtown mall: Less than $12 small fried chicken sandwich, a fancier deli that fills the hole of Chickadee/Kitchenette, a hot dog cart in the Cafe Frank cafe space, a falafel stand with a fixins bar, Luce, cheap breakfast biscuit sandwiches

I feel greedy demanding a hot dog cart to cater to my lunch demands when Mai Tea has blessed me recently with their bahn mi, but I promise, I have enough appetite to street food to go around

Yeah, opened it this evening to look for hot dog updates and learned that the Free Bridge Lane Promenade is terrible (I rode my bike on it last week and it was lovely, very much encourage everyone to get out and enjoy it this beautiful weather weekend)

Someone posted on NextDoor about opening a hot dog stand six months ago and following up on that post is the only reason I open that app and haven’t deleted it yet, still waiting on that hot dog

The zone is based on the amount of bus service schools is able to provide with driver availability and what schools feels like is a reasonable distance for a kid to walk. Whether it is safer or generating more car trips has had nothing to do with the decision to provide more school buses or not.

25 mph on major streets, 20 mph on “local/neighborhood” streets, 15 mph on “yield” streets that are too narrow to have bi-directional travel/parking/sidewalks. Still figuring out how this rolls out, but it’ll be over the next few years and is going to take a lot of traffic calming work.

It’s all enforcement, fees, regulation, and very little filling the gap in needs with serious investments in public goods and community resources

Fascinating that a “genuine populist economic agenda” doesn’t mention investing in anything or anyone and is just about pretending to police the oligarchy

My only critique of the bahn mi concept is not enough melted cheese and luckily there is a unified block of French-adjacent cuisine in the heart of Cville where I can fuse the best sandwich and dip

He came back with 3 of them and now the whole staff keeps popping out of the back with smiles on their faces. “We have to do everything we can to keep that place open forever” is the first thing he says to me

I told someone on the waitstaff of a slow restaurant downtown about this bahn mi and he momentarily wound up his whole body before he took off out the door like a cartoon character

Hark! I bring tidings of great joy: the newish Vietnamese spot next to Melting Pot (Mai Tea) finally got their special bread oven and are selling $9 bahn mi that I am probably going to eat at least once a week for the rest of my life

I’m saying the conclusions of that threshold policy question are wildly inconsistent when you compare transit to other public goods

You wouldn’t be the first person to point out there are user fees and means testing for some of these. Heck, I threw in public health and I know how we deal with that in America. But yeah, why though? And why are seemingly-progressive policy experts saying transit specifically should be?

The fare that was in place before barely paid for the maintenance of the fare boxes. Removing it has had no impact on CAT’s ability to provide more service. The trolley was always free and no one ever questioned the benefit until the other routes were also made free.

There already is one of those, but it serves that stop once an hour. A bus holds like 50 people. The high school has a peak hour demand of 2000+ people, so they aren’t all fitting in that bus for starters. A school bus network is the easiest way of fulfilling that demand.

Why though? When we invest in sufficient facilities and programs for other public goods like public schools, we don’t say “oh we need to consider user fees”, we just raise taxes and pay for it. Why wouldn’t we just do the same to build and operate a real transit system?

If that’s what you want to call coordination between the city schools and the transit agency who runs the school bus service, sure

But should they? Where’s the dividing line where we decide that a public good needs that? Are we making school children pay user fees for classes when they are in a free public school? Why would we do the same in a publicly owned park?

You need to have schools in locations that support high transit ridership to do that. As much as we’d like our high schoolers to have that option, the high school is in the lowest density location possible in the city. Adding more transit there would effectively just be recreating the school bus.

You are saying we can’t use political power change laws to raise more revenue to make those budgets less limited? I get that the state has the heaviest role in determining funding constraints, but voters can make changes there too, just like they did in the NYC primary

Crank up congestion pricing/income tax/some other progressive revenue generator and do both expansion and free buses?

The change was a very funny moment because every traffic engineer was like “oh no, no more standards? Now what am I going to do?”

Especially true since “the book” (MUTCD) changed a year and half ago to say “use your judgement and consider context outside of warrants”

But yeah, I would love it if my colleagues and electeds would read either book