Rebuilding Morale in DC

At the Washington Monthly, John Donahue and Max Stier argue that some of government’s most intractable problems remain so because they’re in the hands of the worst-run agencies. Fixing them will take high-level commitment:
In many European and Asian countries the high status of public service helps offset modest financial rewards. But in the U.S., decades [...]

Mother of All Traffic Jams

I have friends going to Washington for Obama’s inauguration, but I’m content to watch it on TV, thank you very much. Even the DC Metro system is expecting madhouse-level crowds:
“It will be sardine crush-load on the way in and sardine crush-load on the way out,” agency spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein said.
The image, by the way, is of the [...]

Climate Change: “Partner … Ally”

Obama had a message for the country’s governors on Tuesday:

Buffalo’s Hidden History

Given that a lot of peeps in my family still live in Buffalo, I try somewhat to keep up on what’s happening back there. Needless to say, the town has obviously fallen on hard time. The NYT, however, had an excellent piece in Friday’s paper about how some folks are trying to preserve some of [...]

Another Public Housing Failure

Sad story in the NYT about the elevator problems dogging the Wagner homes in East Harlem. The lifts are extremely unreliable and have caused serious disruptions to the lives of people who hardly need the added aggravation. Needless to say, the poor maintenance of public housing is a serious and nationwide issue.

SpaceX Makes It

NASA Watch has the on-board video. The first-stage separation still looked rough to me but they got away with it.

Seattle Transit

Matt Yglesias points out, or more accurately has it pointed out to him, that California isn’t the only major player with a big rail bond/program on the ballot this fall.

The Vision Thing

NASA Administration Mike Griffin teaches a little history:
The planned Apollo 20 mission was cancelled a few weeks after the Apollo 11 landing, and Apollo 18 and 19 were cancelled some months later. With those actions, the space program as we knew it in the 1960s was over, finished, and done. NASA is often blamed for [...]

China to Top TGV

The Chinese are growing four-lane highways like weeds, but they also want the world’s fastest high-speed rail system:
“It is possible that we can start to manufacture 380km/h trains in two years time, and put them into service on the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway,” Mr Zhang told the state-owned China Daily.
Meanwhile, here in the US it’s a [...]

Rebuilding Passenger Rail

It’s been out for a while now, but a study group says it’d take about $357B over the next 40-plus years to re-create a passenger rail system that would offer travel times competitive with the auto. That annualizes to about $8.1B a year. The group suggests that the feds pick up 80 percent of the [...]