Special because it’s on Saturday, not because there’s any world-shaking news going on. I just figured since I didn’t post all day Friday (busy taking care of grandchildren), I should provide a forum today.
From my perspective, the topical pickings are slim, but maybe there’s something on your minds. Here are a couple of suggestions:
- Clemson considers total tobacco ban — As you may recall, USC already instituted one. I liked Harris Pastides’ communitarian approach to enforcing the ban: “This isn’t about how many people we catch,” he said. “It’s about how many behaviors we could change.” Lots of times libertarians don’t want to ban things because enforcement can’t be perfect, or because trying to enforce perfectly would require an unwise reallocation of resources. But it’s best to look at these things in terms of the gain — in this case, less smoking going on than previously — rather than in terms of absolutes.
- Amid crisis in Ukraine, U.S. to deploy troops to Poland — And if that doesn’t worry you enough, NATO moves to ease mounting worries in Baltic. Cold War 2.0 is getting kind of hairy. (I keep seeing that construction, “Cold War 2.0.” Somehow, that feels really late-90s to me. The kind of expression that would have seemed cool back during the dot-com bubble. Kind of retro now. Anyone agree?)
- U.N. envoy: Palestinian Christians kept from holy site — Just to give you something kind of Easter-weekend related.
But as usual, talk amongst yourselves about whatever…
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I was thinking about bus service the other day, and I was wondering how the service in Columbia could be improved. I know that the Clemson Area Transport Service (CATS) is supposed to be a good mass transit system. From what I understand, it is free and it covers the town and university as well as some outlying areas. It even has a wiki article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clemson_Area_Transit.
Why couldn’t that happen in Columbia? Maybe the university could operate the system for the campus and a certain part of the city, and the COMET could cover the rest of the area. I don’t think we’ll ever have a walkable city without a good bus service. What are your thoughts? Happy Easter!
Clemson is way smaller than Columbia in population and geography. I am not sure how that affects things. I have long believed that free public transit would be a net good. We subsidize roads and parking, why not something better for the environment?
What public transit at Clemson may look like: http://bit.ly/1tslq7x
Actually, the CAT buses are quite nice and comfortable. See http://www.catbus.com. My biggest complaints about the service when I worked on campus is that either:
1. They were so crammed with students that it was sometimes difficult to get on a bus during class change times, or
2. The buses weren’t running full schedules between semesters and it was sometimes difficult to catch a bus when it was needed.
Neither complaint is a telling criticism, mind you.
Instead of Cold War 2.0, how about “Russia: The Empire Strikes Back”,/p>?