Anti-car in Los Angeles

From Randal O'Toole:

Bus ridership in Los Angeles is plummeting says the Wall Street Journal, but LA Metro CEO Phil Washington thinks he has the solution.

“It’s too easy to drive in this city,” says Washington. To get people back on the buses, the city needs to be “actually making driving harder.”

The main way he wants to do that is to turn existing street lanes into exclusive bus lanes. The increased congestion, he says, would help “change behavior in a city whose culture is largely built around driving.”

Transit carries less than 2 percent of passenger miles in the Los Angeles urban area, while automobiles carry well over 90 percent. Unfortunately for Washington, those pesky auto drivers for some reason are resisting his efforts to take away their driving lanes.

“Sometimes you have to tell people what’s good for them,” Washington told the Journal...

According to the University of Minnesota Center for Transportation Studies, the average Los Angelean can reach 50 percent more jobs in a 20-minute auto drive than a 60-minute transit ride. Adding a few exclusive bus lanes isn’t going to change that much.

See also Report: 98% of US Commuters Support Public Transportation for Others.

He's getting crazier

Daily Kos:

That is a direct quote from a Republican strategist as reported two hours ago by Business Insider: "He's deteriorating in plain sight"...

Some of the new concern is related to Trump’s continuing insistence on saying he was right that Dorian could hit Alabama...

But what people are telling Business Insider reveals the degree to which those who are seeing him up close are concerned he is totally cracking up:

Asked why the president was obsessed with Alabama instead of the states that would actually be affected by the storm, the strategist said, "you should ask a psychiatrist about that; I'm not sure I'm qualified to comment."

One person who was close to Trump's legal team during the Russia investigation told Insider his public statements were "nothing compared to what he's like behind closed doors.”

"He's like a bull seeing red," this person added. "There's just no getting through to him, and you can kiss your plans for the day goodbye because you're basically stuck looking after a 4-year-old now."

"No one knows what to expect from him anymore," one former White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations about the president, told Insider. "His mood changes from one minute to the next based on some headline or tweet, and the next thing you know his entire schedule gets tossed out the window because he's losing his shit."

He cancels a trip to Denmark because they won’t sell him Greenland. He cancels a trip to Poland (whom he then congratulates for getting invaded by the Nazis 80 years ago) saying he has to monitor Hurricane Dorian, then goes golfing for much of the weekend. When he did travel abroad, to the G7 in Biarritz, he made so many outlandish claims that even those leaders who thought they had figured out how to put up with him were reduced to stunned silence.