Comments on: A train ride across Michigan

By: Humanize the Earth! » A Public Service

Humanize the Earth! » A Public Service — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 05:19:08 +0000

[...] while back, I posted about how our basic infrastructure should be provided collectively. I was speaking about trains, but could’ve just as easily been talking about overnight bus [...]

By: winnipeg: an undetermined urbanity

winnipeg: an undetermined urbanity — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 23:22:29 +0000

An Overlooked Transit Improvement?

Night buses will not end up �making� Transit any money at all, but are essential public services even supposed to make money for the governments that provide them? It obviously can not be a hole to sink public monies into, but the issue of providing …

By: ted

ted — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 07:07:02 +0000

Yes, the el is wonderful. And fairly insufficient as far as that goes. We need more. And we need better policies all around so sprawl isn’t subsidized. And Ann Arbor’s not such a big place. Why can’t we have good transit there as well? More density, more working together, more cooperation, more retail and employement near housing, better biking facilities, more cooperative housing …

I almost said “Don’t get me started!” but of course you already did! :-)

peace,
ted

By: Cyndy

Cyndy — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 05:22:59 +0000

When my daughter moved to Chicago she considered taking her car with her. She was very happy not having her car once she got there. Now she’s moving back to Ann Arbor and having to deal with a cumbersome car again is going to be a huge drawback for her.
There are so many reasons to have a system like the el and yet so few willing to acknowledge it.

By: Tropology

Tropology — Sun, 08 Jan 2006 19:57:04 +0000

I think I got the following link right…

http://quixote.blogs.com/telecompolicy/2006/01/the_federal_com.html

The reason I am posting it in connection here is that certain things are hard to express when the market frame is abused… in other words it seems to me that abuses of the market frame undermine general discourse.

The value of public libraries is something that goes beyond straightforward return on investment. We (most of us) easily see the logic of such public goods.

What we may not think about is that they are part of a system. A library is s system. I am not using it in the sense of the library system as a network of libraries … but it applies there too.

Now, streetlights and roads are parts of a system too. And if we can think of aspects of our commonly lived in environment as part of a system I think we can make steps to break free from market notions.

The central theme in these market notions is that ‘private sector’ does it better, and this leads to the conclusion: gov’t should stay out of it as provider of service and as regulator of the field, but then further serves as a screen to what will actually occur… gov’t wont ever fully get out of regulation… there will always be a rewrite of the rules, and there will always be rules. The rules privilege certain parties and certain holders of the levers of power. I’m not arguing against rules, only that we would all be better served to get past the notions of deregulation. There is no deregulation… only re-regulation.

So tying this in to the link to Snider’s article… I really appreciate the effort to promote multi-purpose networks where the benefot to all is an incrmental cost to a project that will go forward anyway. This belies the abuse of logic that offers that any service is better undertaken exclusively by the market.