Whomp Whomp

TWO KINGS. 👑

Today I asked an abortion advocate what her favorite method of abortion is.

BART spent $90 million on new fare gates. They're recovering about $10 million a year in fares. That's a 9-year payback on paper. The actual return hit in six months. Embarcadero station went from 112 hours of corrective maintenance in the six months before installation to 2 hours after. Daly City saved 109. Balboa Park saved 75. Across the system, 961 hours of cleanup work disappeared. Corrective maintenance is the term BART uses for graffiti, heavy soiling, vandalism, the damage that needs a crew not a janitor. At several stations it dropped to zero. Crime fell 41% year over year. Riders who reported seeing fare evasion on their trip dropped from 22% to 10%. Citations issued by BART police went from 2,200 in January to under 1,000 in July, because there was nothing to cite. The gates were a filtering project disguised as a revenue project. Old BART gates were waist-high orange fins designed in the 1970s. You could hop them in under a second. That made the station effectively a public space, and the rider mix reflected that. The new gates are 72 inches of polycarbonate with 3D sensors that detect tailgating. You either pay or you don't enter. Once you don't enter, you also don't smoke on the platform, sleep in the elevator, or harass other riders. BART tried hiring more police for years. Blitz operations at high-traffic stations. Increased patrols. Dedicated transit cops. None of it moved the numbers the way six feet of polycarbonate did. The $10 million in recovered fares is the smallest line in the return. Fare revenue used to cover 70% of BART operations. After the pandemic it collapsed to 22%. The gates won't fix that gap directly. They fix the precondition for fixing it: a system that office workers, families, and tourists are willing to use again. Ridership growth at stations with new gates outpaced ungated ones before the rollout finished. A $400 million annual deficit is heading to voters in November as a sales tax measure. Voters don't approve sales taxes for transit agencies they don't feel safe in. The $90 million on gates is buying BART the right to ask the public for more money. That's the real return on six feet of polycarbonate.

Nithya Raman leads the Los Angeles Mayor race with a 53% chance of winning

This is a remarkable shift. People in *every single one* of the top US-allied countries now believe it’s better to depend on China than on the US. The global balance of power is clearly tilting away from the US and toward China.

Rahm Emanuel throws Democrats under the bus for three minutes straight—then casually walks off with a sip of coffee. Watch this guy closely. He clearly wants to be president. “The Democratic Party… invited a bunch of culture wars into our kids’ schools, and we lost that war.” “Up in San Francisco, [Democrats] were arguing and voted to take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of a high school. Not whether they were worried about whether the kids knew why Abraham Lincoln was such an icon, and the school was named after him. They lost the plot.” “The American people… want us to show up and help them. Not argue about Latinx as a term. Not argue about defunding the police… or letting the border get out of control.” “We actually have to show respect for the American people, their primary concerns, and help them.” “Went down to Mississippi. They went from 49th to 9th in reading. A lot of interest groups don’t want to talk about it. We messed this up in our party.” “We used to be really great about education. We’ve lost it… We’re worried about names of schools, bathrooms, locker room access. Get back to what matters.” “Why do parents move to a neighborhood? Because that’s a good school for their kid. If you focus on that, guess what? People are going to support you. If you don’t focus on it, they’re going to walk away from you.” [Sips coffee while the audience applauds]