Orwellian Transit Ridership

This is a nice story in the Strib today, that transit ridership is at its highest since 1984. That might seem exciting to folks, but with a new LRT leading the way it shouldn't really surprise. What is actually surprising is that transit ridership has been so low for the last 22 years. This is the important passage from the piece:

The higher numbers this year follow a 7 percent boost in combined bus and light-rail ridership in 2005, despite a 25 cent bus fare increase and some bus service reductions at that time. [link]

The state has been underfunding the transit system for along time, and it's been especially bad during the GOP years (post-1998). Add the cut that the bus system sustained a huge cut two years ago to the MetroTransit strike, and you should (and do) have one of the least-supported transit systems in the country.

But, despite all that, people are still riding buses in record numbers. And with the MVEST amendment passing last week, and a DLF (and Minneapolis) dominated legislature set to take over at the state, we might see some huge improvements in TC people-moving in the next few years. Not to mention the Northstar and Central Corridor systems in the works...

Yes, it's a good time to have a bus pass.

Update:

Brilliant, Brilliant.

To make the city more inviting to drive and walk through, Rybak recommended concentrating commuter express buses on Marquette and 2nd Avenues and building attractive, high quality shelters to serve riders.

To make Nicollet Mall more pleasant for pedestrians and patrons at outdoor cafes, the mayor called on Metro Transit to drastically reduce the buses using the mall, keeping only the routes that use clean, quiet hybrid buses.

He also recommended returning Hennepin Avenue to two-way traffic to better serve businesses on both sides of the street and make it a "Main Street" for people who want to see the city from their cars.

The mayor has included $2.8 million in his budget for 2007 to get started on downtown street changes and continue studying prospects for streetcar construction in Minneapolis.

Streetcars, which are designed for short distance travel, can operate in mixed traffic and make frequent stops, would help make the city more walkable, Rybak said. Because the city does not have ready funds to build streetcar lines, which cost about $30 million per mile, he suggested paying for them by capturing the tax revenue from increased property values sparked by the streetcar lines.

Too bad Rybak is going to run for Senate in '08 (and lose?), and that none of this will come to pass...

This is much better

I am just watching the bush press conference, and it's like watching your aging grandmother forget where she lives. serious schadenfreude. Bush started off with the world's least embraced joke ("Say, why all the glum faces?" ... [20 second pause]). Bush then dropped a trope: He said, "it is clear the democrat party had a good night last night." If that doesn't sound important, you haven't read the Rick Hertzberg piece on the use of the adjective 'democrat' without the -ic. Well, go to it, and see how high this new verbal fetish has ascended, or how low Bush ahs fallen. Desperate times... &c.

As for the results, my first reactiong is to think about the way the DCCC candidates did poorly overall in this race. Here in Minnesota we had two really competetive House races, Bachmann v. Wetterling in the sububan/exurban 6th district open seat, and Gutknecht (6-term incumbent) v. Walz in the rural 1st district.

The former race was on the DCCC hotlist for many months, and Rahm's campaign commmitee poured a ton of dough into the race -- I think both candidates spent something like $3 million, which is a lot of TV ads. Meanwhile, Walz was chronically underfunded, vastly outspent by his incumbent opponent, and ran a campaign that relied on grassroots volunteering and internet fundraising as much as insitutional support.

And in the end, Walz won by a good margin while Wetterling was trounced. Now, you can say that MN-01 is not as Republican a district as MN-06, or you can say that Wetterling was never a good candidate and that Bachmann has a certian diabolic charisma -- you'd be right. But the fact is that Emmanuel's DCCC invested in the wrong race, and favored the wrong candidate. Here, the DC DLC crowd showed that they're not really in touch with voters.

And Minnesota is not the only place where that happened. The single race where the DCCC went out farthest on the limb was IL-06 (Duckworth v. Roskam), an open seat in Emmanuel's neighboring district. During the primary election, Emmanuel pissed off a lot of people by pushing his candidate, Tammy Duckworth, over local favorite Christine Cegalis.
Then, Rahm poured over $3 million DCCC dollars into the race, and made it the top stopping point for political stump speeches. And last night, Duckworth lost by 2% in an open seat in a big Dem year.

The same thing happened in KY-04, where the DCCC helped out ex-Rep. Ken Lucas. Again, he lost, while at the same time unheralded candidate John Yarmuth, an unabashed liberal, beat a well-funded incumbent with
very little DC support.

I'm kind of dreaming here, but this might be a sign that TV ads are becoming less effective at delivering political messages. It might be a sign that the internet, and old fashioned door knocking combined with a state of the art voter database are the way to go. Finally, it might be a sign that the DLC has their heads up their asses.

Whatever the significance, it just became a lot more fun to watch Bush press conferences. I think the media is going to suddenly find its spine.

Also:

Here's a response from an unnamed political operative... currently educating herself at the Sorbonne.

I'm lucky enough to be taking a class with Elaine Kamark (DLC co-founder) and David Gergen (White House advisor to every prez since Nixon except Carter and Bush II, also pundit) and so on occasions like this, I get a sort of unique insight of how the political elite look at these things.

Even Kamark, today, said she thinks that, in the end, Dean is going to get a lot more credit than Rahm will. Especially since so many Dem pickups were in very red states like Indiana - Dean's 50-state strategy, etc.

Both Gergen and Kamark think that TV is increasingly less important in campaigns. Not that campaigns spend less, but that the days of GOTV standing for get-on-TV are over. Have you read Applebee's America? If not, you must.

I think it's becoming more and more clear that the candidates (and on a larger scale, the party) that can win are those who 1. run real campaigns, and by "real" I mean campaigns in which you actually talk to voters and take field seriously and 2. are sincere. Michele Bachmann may be batshit-crazy in that Katherine Harris kind of way, but does anyone doubt her sincerity?

I've been thinking a lot about MN today b/c I think there's a lot to be learned from what happened there: not just in those two races, but in the Gov and Sen races too. some things I've been thinking:

1. It's really hard to beat someone with a compelling personal story. Walz has one. Patty should have one, but she didn't really seem to use it much.

2. I think you're right about the campaigns. Look at the difference between the campaigns that won vs those that lost:

Klobuchar: massive grassroots campaign run by an experienced grassroots organizer and Camp Wellstone trainer (Ben Goldfarb)

Hatch: did the dude even run a campaign? As of this summer, he had two staff members. A gubernatorial campaign should be the standard-bearer, heading up the coordinated campaign, providing a sort of moral leadership. To be honest, I'm shocked that he got as close as he did to winning. Pawlenty ran a much better campaign, and I hate to say it, but he deserved to win.

You already said enough about Patty and Tim. Walz is also just such a good candidate.

The Dems have a really, really big opportunity now. Hope we don't blow it!

The Winning Ticket

I was of the opinion that the upcoming political election was all about Iraq, tax cuts, corruption, and mammoth levels of incompentence.

But today I learned that the real reason the GOP might lose control of the house is an attack on that most sacred of American institutions: Daylight Savings Time.

This is from the Hotline:

A Surprise Ad Buy

In its latest independent expenditure filing, the NRCC just bought ad time on behalf of Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN 03) after conducting a poll in the district last week. The buy totals over $72,000 -- a relatively small amount. The Democrats have a self-funding candidate running, Ft. Wayne City Councilman Tom Hayhurst. But it's a solidly GOP district -- Pres. Bush won here with 68% in 2004, and Souder has won over 60% every cycle since 1998.

Outside Ohio, Indiana's provided the roughest state environment for the Republicans. Gov. Mitch Daniels' unpopularity (because of privatizing the Indiana Toll Road, implementing Daylight Savings' time) has made the re-election bids of Reps. Chris Chocola (R-IN 02), John Hostettler (R-IN 08) and Mike Sodrel (R-IN 09) very precarious. Could that same environment make Souder's re-election more challenging than he once expected? [JOSH KRAUSHAAR]
[link]

Three seats in Indiana are in play, and they currently boast some of the largest leads for Democrats over incumbent Republicans in the country. Daylight Savings Time -- the New Third Rail of American Politics.

This precocious tidbit (a blast from the past) is from my first ever post on the second website:

DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME is my favorite time of the year, mostly because it is so short. Most holidays, like President's Day for example, are a whole day long, and what am I supposed to do? I can only celebrate President's for so long before I get tired. And Thanksgiving and Christmas are even worse. I think everyone will agree that twelve days of Christmas are far too many days long for a holiday to be. So I like Daylight Savings Time because it's only an hour long. I suppose if it were like all the other holidays, it would be called Daylight Savings Day, but how relieving that its not?

Once while talking to a reliable source, I learned that they do not celebrate Daylight Savings Time in the state of Indiana. This leaves me impressed, but also befuddled. How can an entire state decide not to participate in a national event of this magnitude? I can see why some states might opt out of certain celebrations, an example being Columbus Day, which is sometimes a vacation and sometimes not a vacation depending on what state you're in. But, what can be more important to our daily lives than time, with its alarm clocks and digital watches? And what about the people who live on the border between Indiana and some state next to Indiana? Are they still late for work? On the news, do they have to say, "Well, don't forget to set your clocks back... unless you're in Indiana, and then you can go ahead and forget." It all leads to problems, problems, and more problems.

I would like to say to the people of Indiana that I respect your gumption. Its not easy, when faced with so many other states all acting together, to just sit back and say, rocking ever so gently in your chair, "Take this Daylight Savings Time and shove it." But don't you think its time to grow up? Look at all the time we're saving in all these other states, the very time that you don't get to save over in Indiana. Why not save some time with us? I bet if you tried it, you would like it.

But on the other hand, I can see your point, because Daylight Savings Time isn't as good as it should be. First of all, it is always on a Sunday, where nobody will notice it. So this year, I've decided to move mine to Monday, where it makes more sense. And it worked really well this morning. When I woke up it was already sunshine outside, which wasn't happening last week at all. And so I was a big fan of this Daylight Savings Time until I got out of work and it was dark. That ruined my day. I think they should make Daylight Savings Time twice as long, and put one on each end of the day. I know some of you math people might object to this, but don't worry because I thought of that too. I think we should just cut an hour out of the middle of the day, and put it on the end of the day. And my suggestion is 9-10 in the morning, when nobody works anyway. Go ahead and try to think of the last thing you did between 9 and 10, because I bet you can't think of anything. That way this holiday would really be something else.

The Catalpas Have Spoken: Fall Has Fallen

There are two catalpa "bean" trees in my front yard, funky herky-jerky trees with big fat leaves as big as your head and little bean pods hanging down from all about. These are strange trees, and their large leaves bud very late in the spring. It's practically the middle of June before you've got full foilage.

And I each year I think that those giant leaves will last through 'til November, like the guy who shows up five hours into your party and doesn't leave until 3 A.M., drinking the last remnants of a vodka bottle on your couch and talking on and on about how impossible it is to meet people in this town.

But the catalpa always surprises. Yesterday, when I went to bed all those big leaves were firmly attached to the tree, as per normal. Not a single one had de-branched. This morning, I kid you not, I walked out my front door and was stunned to find thousands of leaves on the ground. Almost the entire tree had jumped ship, taken the plunge, called it quits, jumped the shark, cashed in the chips, kicked the bucket, said sayonara, arividerci, Geronimo! I take my leave, good sir.

I got home today from work and there wasn't a single leaf left on those trees. Not one. Like lemmings, it was. I've never met a tree with such an on-off switch as these two. They're passive-aggressive, schitzophrenic. Sure it snowed a little. There were some flurries... but last week it was 80 degrees outside, and I was basking on the riverbank in the goddamned heat. And now I'm going to have to put on my snowsuit and rake about thirty cubic feet of leaves into bags and bricks of compost.

"Amps Against Apathy" Targets Apathetic

The University of Minnesota campus is plastered today wtih posters and chalkings advertising "Amps Against Apathy," a rally on the Northrop Mall tonight at 7:00 featuring "rock and roll" and "action." The event is sponsored by some group called "Democracy Matters," and I'm pissed. What do the rockers have against the apathetic?

That's why I'm announcing here on this blog a counter-protest.

Announcing:

APATHETICS ARE PEOPLE TOO:
A Counter-Protest for the Apathetic
Northrop Mall -- Friday 10/6 @ 7 pm

I've got some signs aready made... saying things like, "Apathetics are People Too!," or "Down with Care-ism." We're gonna be standing around, not waving flags, chanting "Hell No! We won't care," or "What do we want? ... When do we want it? ..."

Who's with me?