It's Not Too Late To Vote
The US election is over, but that doesn't mean you have to stop voting! The geek-hipsters (or is it hipster-geeks?) at Front Seat just launched a new website that lets you vote on priorities for the Obama administration's brand-new Office of Urban Policy.
Users have submitted dozens of ideas -- everything from investing in rail, to changing zoning laws to promote walkable development, to reforming systemic pro-highway biases in federal transportation funding. There are so many good ideas on the list, it's hard to choose just one -- so they actually give you 10 votes, which you can apportion among different ideas as you see fit.
Will the administration pay any attention? Maybe a bit, if we're lucky; but the influence will depend on how many people actually vote. Regardless, it's always fun to have your say and to see how other folks' priorities line up with your own. Right now, rail investments are winning in a landslide. But there are plenty of other worthy options on the table.
Front Seat is the outfit that created Walk Score -- a phenomenally useful website that lets you check out how pedestrian-friendly your neighborhood is. And since you're wasting time anyway, you should also check out sister site that lets you have your say on technology priorities for the Obama administration.
What K.C. Said
Uncertain about the big automaker bailout? I give you KC Golden of Climate Solutions, in a Seattle P-I op-ed:
Saving GM under any circumstances is a hard swallow. This is the company whose Vice Chairman Bob Lutz says "global warming is a total crock of s - - -."
GM sent a posse of executives and lobbyists to Olympia to fight Washington's Clean Car Act in 2006, a law that will reduce climate pollution from new cars by 30 percent and save Washington consumers more than $2 billion in fuel costs.
And:
The market wants efficient cars; the engineers can produce them; the law requires them. But GM's lawyers and executives fight on for their right to commit commercial suicide and planetary ecocide, even as they descend on Congress, cup in hand.
Come again -- why should we dig deep to save a company that seems so resolutely determined to destroy itself, taking the economy and the planet down with it?
Go read the whole thing here.
Plus, if that's not enough GM reading, you can take a look at Thomas Friedman's latest, which also appears in the P-I today. It's excellent.
