Smooth Move, Ex-Lax

Includes a dialog with The Offender

With friends like these, who needs enemas?

The Transport Innovators online discussion group is nothing if not a bubbling cauldron of problematica^®, so it's good to see it is still capable of eliciting a good-old-fashioned spit take:

Seattle Times throws bus drivers, riders under the bus

The Seattle Times' editorial position on the $20 car tab tax for King County Metro transit service is really quite shocking.

Here it is, a vital public infrastructure component, just as vital as water, electricity and sewers, but transit is something the Times has decided ought to be starved ( http://bit.ly/pcYZ8X ). The paper:

Baby gets bad welcome gift

The most important regional environmental news of the past week was the arrival of a new Orca baby in Puget Sound, K-44 (http://goo.gl/9S9xs). Welcome baby boy!

However, the good news is balanced by an item from the previous week, concerning the results of last month's tabletop oil spill response drill:

"The drill showed procedures introducing oil dispersants on a spill need improving." (http://goo.gl/Yw1mg)

We ought to be alarmed state and federal authorities are talking about dispersants at all. First, as we now know from the aftermath of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, dispersants don't remove the oil, they only make the oil invisible. Second, dispersants kill phytoplankton and bacteria in the food chain.

And third: DISPERSANTS ARE ILLEGAL in Puget Sound (http://goo.gl/G6GMP).

Republican debaters mention the environment

In case any doubts remain, here is the only explicit mention of the environment (that I heard) in tonight's debate among Republican candidates for president:

"What we need is the mother of all repeal bills," Bachmann said, promising to get rid of Obama's national health-care law and new regulations on the financial industry and to rename the Environmental Protection Agency the "Job Killing Agency of America." (http://goo.gl/o88td)

Rick Santorum inadvertently took an implicitly pro-environment position, in mentioning his opposition to ethanol subsidies. I guess ethanol must not work in lubricants.

The 6 Surrenders Of Vukan R. Vuchic

Something the pro-transit environmental movement has been advocating for decades is the idea of the intermodal transit system of trains and buses. Some of us would like to add Personal Rapid Transit to that short list.

Such a system, if pervasive enough, would allow people to travel around cities without driving. And if deployed in conjunction with thoughtful land use planning, redevelopment, and urban growth boundaries, the transit system could assist in correcting decades of sprawl made possible by, and in service of, the automobile -- or as I call it, the Private Travel Appliance.