Transportation doublethink

Saturday, the first day of May. It’s Calamity Jane‘s birthday.

There’s a chicken shortage. And the price of wings is going through the roof.

Should city bus fares be free? In a healthy, financially self-sustaining system that might make sense. But the MBTA is not that and introducing free bus service brings lots of hidden costs. One transportation analyst interviewed by the Globe, Phineas Baxandall, says that those costs are not really costs. “You can define that as a cost, or you can define that as an enormous policy achievement,” Baxandall said. “In the face of possibilities of actually increasing transit ridership, it shouldn’t be seen as just a cost.” That sounds a lot like me trying to justify a new camera purchase to my wife.

Some voices are more soothing than others. (Gilbert Gottfried comes to mind as an exception that proves the rule.) The BBC explores the role our voices play in social settings.

Fireworks season is coming. The City Council is going to handle it this year.

And a group of folks in Japan decided to carry 6 ordinary stones around for 1300 years (scroll down for English). They started the project in 2014. Only one thousand, two hundred and ninety three years to go.

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