DC City Council member: Let students ride transit fare-free

Biddle said teachers have told him that some students miss school at the end of the month because the family doesn’t have train or bus fare.

WashingtonPost

Endgame Approacheth - Death by Car

Endgame Approacheth - Death by Car: "HSBC has calculated what would happen to energy consumption by 2050 given plausible forecasts for economic growth and assuming no constraint on resources, or that humans carry on using energy in the “taken for granted” way they do at the moment.
[D]emand in China, India and other emerging markets soars, but there is also quite considerable growth from advanced economies too. The big picture is that with an additional one billion cars on the road, demand for oil would grow 110%, to more than 190 million barrels per day. Total demand for energy would rise by a similar order of magnitude, doubling the amount of carbon in the atmosphere to more than three and a half times the amount climate change scientists think would keep temperatures at safe levels." Jeremy Warner The Telegraph via Death by Car

Should Transit Be Free? | Car Free Baltimore

Also, auto user fees don't even pay the full

 construction and maintenance costs of roads

 (this statement probably wouldn't have fit on her back).

Should Transit Be Free? | Car Free Baltimore:

• "Reduction in operating costs (fare collectors, payment system terminals would be abolished)
• Increased ridership
• Broader demographic groups would ride because of convenience and low barriers to entry
• The environmental, social and health benefits (positive externalities) of each new transit rider would more than compensate for lost fare box revenue
• More political power/representation due to massive increases in ridership"

the world is changing faster than we know

How will America handle the fall of its Middle East empire? – Telegraph Blogs: "America’s global interests are under threat on a scale never before seen. Since 1956, when Secretary of State John Foster Dulles pulled the plug on Britain and France over Suez, the Arab world has been a US domain. At first, there were promises that it would tolerate independence and self-determination. But this did not last long; America chose to govern through brutal and corrupt dictators, supplied with arms, military training and advice from Washington.
The momentous importance of the last few weeks is that this profitable, though morally bankrupt, arrangement appears to be coming to an end. One of the choicest ironies of the bloody and macabre death throes of the regime in Libya is that Colonel Gaddafi would have been wiser to have stayed out of the US sphere of influence. When he joined forces with George Bush and Tony Blair five years ago, the ageing dictator was leaping on to a bandwagon that was about to grind to a halt."