regul

It sounds like they're praising it in Japan and saying "of course it could never work here, Americans are just genetically predisposed to cars".

Which public transport? Tokyo Metro is publicly-owned. Some of the JR branches are still publicly-owned. JR was only privatized in the late 80s as an anti-labor move and to deflect from the unpopularity of closing unprofitable rural lines. But of course the government built most of the network, including the first shinkansen lines.

very funny to see this coming from Reason, a libertarian rag that hates public transit

Well, the article's thesis is more that transportation/traffic engineers don't care. DoTs are set up to get grants and spend money, with a focus on throughput. Very little thought is put into safety, and most "safety" best practices are confusing, outdated, or poorly thought out.

What solution is AI going to come up with other than "stop burning fossil fuels"? We already know the solution to climate change. Acting like we don't is absurd.

I think a good first step in meeting climate goals would be eating Eric Schmidt.

I meant in other countries. Rural France is still conservative, for example. So is rural Japan.

Plenty of places with developed rail networks are still conservative in rural places.

It's Idaho, so I can only assume someone with MAGA brainworms will attempt to roll coal through the middle of it in a giant lifted truck.

Excuse the overdramatization, but it feels a lot like Frodo going to the Grey Havens. They did something great and now their reward is to disappear forever and be well taken care of.

When asked if he was sure that Albion couldn’t be copyrighted due to its historical context, he replied: “I don’t know if I’m honest, I don’t really know… I hope so. I mean you would think that the responsible person I should be, I would’ve spent the last six months in lawyers’ offices…”

Bold strategy, Cotton.

Tearing down the properties has reduced their local property tax base and also no doubt reduced the values of the properties across the streets as well. It's creating a downward spiral of local tax revenue while no doubt increasing state maintenance obligations.

Decisions like this are why small towns like this are going broke. They make themselves easier to drive through and tear down the properties that constitute their tax base.