Economist article de-paywalled for your convenience.
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This might interest some people here. A good in-depth piece, I thought.
archived:
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drag queen story time police
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… I see they had to draw a new final panel—because the original implies the characters are already in a “high density walkable city” 
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Thank you for pointing this out- I was afraid not too many people were familiar with the format.
I thought about posting this one instead, but wanted to wait until that time of year:
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Please do remind us in the old timely commercial fetishism time of year!
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I missed this story when it first came out. It’s trending now because of mayor/council conflict and concerns about funding:
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They had me at “kebab shop.”
What I object to with how my metropolitan area is handling it is that they are punishing commuters before they have viable alternatives. So many people are dependent on cars for transportation but the city/region/state is disincentivizing driving prior to creating livable neighborhoods or providing viable public transportation. There is nothing I would love more than to be able to take public transportation to work; my 30 minute commute by car would become 3 hours. One way.
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My hypothesis: in metropolitan areas where the infrastructure forces people to use cars, step one (or maybe step zero) is to force/incentivize work-from-home as a common practice.
Right off the bat, that’s taking 20-40% of the cars off the road during high-volume commuting times. This has the double benefit of massively reducing emissions while making the commute for people who have to be at their work location safer and saner.
I even have a policy proposal that will work in capitalist-obsessed areas. Require employers to pay for their employee’s commuting time. Overnight, most employers will go from a “return to work” stance to “work from home if at all possible” policy. It also deals with a common objection, “hey that’s not fair to workers who have to be on site because of the nature of their work!” With this policy, it will treat commuting time as work time, so that workers who have to be on-site are getting compensated for their (commuting) labor.
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Part of the problem… I suspect we’d have a similar struggle where we are. No buses out near us (because our county has a long history of rejecting expansion of the city bus system)… it’s a 30 minute drive to the nearest train station… but when we can get to a bus system, it takes a while to get anywhere (including to the train, which does not go everywhere in the city).
I would love an extension of the train system that goes straight through the county between ATL and other big cities, one of which could go right through a nearby community and would be great to transport… But the further out from the city you get, the more it’s a fear driven reaction. I suspect that the vote for greater public transit will go the other way next time we have it, but not further out from us.
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