Public Transportation and Smart Growth

I rode buses and subways back in the 1970's when it was SCARY. Not in Dallas, Texas or Providence, Rhode Island, but when I visited my older sister who was living in New York City then. I remember the old rules--try not to show you're that prosperous, try to ride seated behind the driver, ride the first subway car if you could. It's a D__N sight safer now, not just in NYC, but in cities across the country. But the members of the fourth estate are still stoking the old, no-longer-accurate paranoia.

Personally, I suspect that a lot of the right-wing "fibber-tarians" trying to do away with government-owned mass transit are as willing to use fear and sub-textual racism to destroy transit systems as the "block-buster" realtors of the 1950's and 1960's. And of course members of the Fourth Estate are too--whatever--to take notice that they're being played--yet again.