Football: Myth destruction
Non-sports post; political/transportation readers feel free to skip. Once again, all over the stupider parts of the PSU sports internet, apologists are claiming that the Big Ten schedule is still stronger than what we'd have ended up with had we stayed the course with our old eastern independent pals plus intersectional games, or that Pitt is equivalent to Temple and should thus not warrant a 1-1 long-term deal, or whatnot. A particularly odious thread at BWI included an attempt to talk about the old schedules as "playing Temple and Syracuse every year". This is a really useful way to look at it, as it turns out! Thanks, homer! Below, you find a table (old school HTML is

Cap Metro is lying to you - again.
This time in an attempt to make excuses for the Red Line being such an unmitigated failure of execution. First off, News 8 is the second media outlet to be completely fooled by this talking point being spread around to many media outlets as a talking point lately. I am also even more disappointed to see Mike Martinez fall for this load of crap. "Comparatively, we're pretty much like the rest of the country. It takes time to build a rail system, but once you get it going, what w

Math with M1EK, Lesson 1
It's come up again, this time on the twitter. The old road-warrior chestnut argument that it doesn't matter if urbanites pay a much higher percentage of their driving costs than do suburbanites, because suburbanites drive more miles overall. This tactic is a favorite of the folks at various car blogs that M1EK frequents as well, and it's time it was taken out back and shot. Let's use our favorite Houston road as an example, thanks to AC for maintaining the story. For

Don't Let The Door Hit You, Fred
One thing left out of many of the accounts of yesterday's fun time is that Capital Metro actually called the cops on the media before eventually relenting and allowing them to stay. Thanks to tweeting reporters Reagan Hackleman and Matt Flener for carrying the torch. Also, Lee Nichols' blog post yesterday had the most details early-on; nobody else mentioned Watson's implied pressure or got Jay Wyatt's attention, both kind of important.

What I Would Have Said
on the Jeff Ward show yesterday had I not had to bail out while on hold. Short form because I'm writing this as I'm complaining about a bogus EZPass charge from last November that the lovely folks in New Jersey are just now trying to stick me with. Dear Carole, a few points: Yes, the commuter rail line sucks. Where have you been?. Yes, they're projecting just 1000 riders per day. No, Rapid Bus isn't going to get 10,000 riders