• Streetfilms goes inside Seattle’s new 13-station Link Light Rail, which opened in mid-2009. (StreetFilms)
• California transportation activist Ken Gosting has drowned in an apparent suicide. A former transportation and emergency services adviser to Gov. Jerry Brown in the mid-1970s, Gosting then successfully lobbied for seat belts in buses. (AP)
• The time has come to rebuild in Haiti. One company is looking to recycle the ruins of Port-au-Prince and replace them with buildings — and this time, they’ll be up to seismic code. (Inhabitat)
• Does this mean the end of dreadful airport lines? Mobile boarding pass sage increased by 1200% in 2009. (Mobilecrunch)
• Caltrans is set to face major lay-offs. Sacramento officials want to cut 1,500 jobs from the “overstaffed” agency. (Sacramento Bee)
• Twelve members of Congress are heading to China, with infrastructure on the agenda. But is it serious business, or spring break? (Washington Post)
• A Dallas native laments the state of the city’s main transportation artery. If only infrastructure could incite the same political passion as illegal immigration. (Dallas News)
• Low cost carriers best the recession: Ryanair and Easyjet have profited during the economic downturn by catering to frugal travelers. (Daily Mail)
• The Department of Energy has enlisted techies to solve America’s energy problems. Here are ten tech companies looking to redesign the country’s energy infrastructure. (Wired)
March 4th, 2010 at 12:16 pm
Caltrans is over staffed. Or more correctly, completely mismanaged. Anyone working there or working with them knows this. While some engineers are working their butts off, others are doing next to nothing. Managers are unable to move staff to meet needs, and more importantly to get rid of dead weight. You would have to commit a serious crime to get fired.
March 4th, 2010 at 1:25 pm
“If only infrastructure could incite the same political passion as illegal immigration.”
There in lays the problem I have with the brain-dead conservatives. (Not all conservatives, just the brain dead ones.) They always want to find someone else to blame for the nations problems. It’s the Gays, or Illegal Immigrants, or Terrorist, or Feminist, or Hippies, or Blacks, or Communist. Right now it’s the Progressives that are destroying America. It’s always someone else.
Conservatives are always blaming someone else, and never willing to get their hand dirty and do the actual hard work to fix real problems. And when someone comes along with a plan that does try to fix a problem, conservatives Filibuster.
March 4th, 2010 at 2:06 pm
@Dallas, maybe the brain dead conservative thought process is more that “It worked before these gays/communists/blacks/terrorists/etc got here so it must be their fault it stopped working.” I agree with you, just trying to play devil’s advocate.
March 4th, 2010 at 3:20 pm
Good point, it’s always annoying to see some political movement that seeks to blame all the nation’s problems on some disfavored group or individual [cough, Christian Conservatives; cough, George W. Bush]
March 4th, 2010 at 5:27 pm
The title for that MobileCrunch article is :
Mobile Boarding Passes Take Off With 1200% Usage Increase In 2009
March 4th, 2010 at 6:10 pm
The difference is, when progressives get elected and hold power they stop trying to blame people and start working on solutions. Conservatives just keep trying to find new people to blame.
What was interesting was in late 2007 when all of their normal scape goats were gone, and there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the crisis facing the nation was the fault of decades of poor decisions. I was actually fooled into thinking that we might finally move to reverse those decisions and fix some problems. But, unfortunately, I was wrong and here we are again making up new “enemies of the nation” and trying to crush their evil plots instead of fixing actuall problems.
March 4th, 2010 at 6:25 pm
@Dallas: Agreed.
The illegal immigrants that incite all this heated conversation amongst the masses are more often than not,
the guy that mows your lawn,
puts a new roof on your house,
is the laborer on virtually every construction site
Serves you your fast food
Cleans the wally world at stupid o’clock in the morning, your house, washes your car, your laundry…..
My god it would seem that they do everything everybody else feels is beneath them. It’s this argument I have with all my neighbours and friends from here.
Oddly enough my entire street had their roofs done in the last 2 years, I only saw hispanics doing the work, the white guy sat in the truck watching
The entire sub division uses 3 landscapers all of whom are hispanic with hispanic crews. Whether they are illegals or not they are still the guys working their asses off. Oh I forgot to mention, on my street, everybody voted Mcain/Palin apart from us. (Not that everybody that voted that way is a brain-dead conservative)
So all these idiots complain about them, yet they use them to do work? You gotta make a choice here you can’t have it both ways…