Learn Damnit

It reminds me a bit of the housing bubble, when I knew there was a housing bubble not because I was a supergenius, but because I knew there was no possible way that many people had high enough incomes to pay for those mortgages in places like Southern California. If people aren't making any money, and what money they make is being skimmed off by various malevolent businesses, they don't have any money to buy stuff. It isn't complicated.

Make It Work

Just adding to this, that it's one thing to gouge the relatively wealth people who presumably are most of the ticketholders, it's another thing to gouge them and then have it be a colossal fail.

Helicopters

Aside from more helicopters than usual yesterday  (and "usual" is too many), didn't really notice any Superb Owl effects these last two weeks.

Yah They Screwed It All Up

So people were stranded at the Superbowl because too many people wanted to take the train home and they were way above capacity. From what I can glean from various sources (I think true, some inconsistencies in reports):

• Expected rail travelers were about 40% of actual rail travelers.
• There were just 13,000 very expensive parking spaces.
• No dropoffs (or pickups) were allowed.  You could not take a (dropoff) cab, limo, or be dropped off by a friend.
• The special charter coach buses which seemed to have been the expected favored travel mode of choice cost about 50 bucks, roughly 5 times the rail fare.
• Even after seeing the massively inflated inbound rail traffic, NJT didn't jump to schedule any buses in order to deal with the obvious "all at once" problem of fans leaving the game
• Not until 3+ hours later did extra buses finally arrive.   Remember this is a Sunday, so Sunday transit schedules would have meant that there were certainly available buses and potentially available bus drivers as Sunday schedules have many fewer scheduled trips.

My basic questions:

• Just who was making these decisions?  I'm guessing lots of people who have never been on a rail platform.
• Was NJT "discouraged" from providing buses, either at all or just in case for overflow,  so as not to compete with the $50 round trip (!) coach buses (this is a 9 mile trip from Midtown).  This is roughly equivalent to what a cab fare would be (in ideal traffic circumstances), except you can split a cab fare between 4 people
• Who made the money from the coach buses?
• Why was rail traffic so underestimated and, similarly, why was coach bus demand so overestimated?
*update: buses sold out, bus demand wasn't overestimated, they just didn't have enough buses*

Congratulations, Shelbyville!

Better luck next year, Springfield.

Super Bowl No. Three

Super Bowl Bugaloo

Super Bowl Something or Other Thread

More Thread

Afternoon Thread

Traditional dumplings and korean fried chicken superbowl food.

Drought

We regularly seem to come right up to the age of a major regional water emergency only to be rescued at the last minute. Wonder about this time...

Nobody Goes There, It's Too Crowded

How PA decisions are made.

"I live in the Poconos, a pretty rural area, but I have a lot of friends in the surrounding area," McCall said during questioning of the Market8 panel. "One of the things they always say is they don't want to drive into the city because they worry about parking. They worry about city traffic."

"How do you get that person to come into Center City," he asked, "when really, they don't want to come into Center City?"

"Surrounding area."

I don't really care about the casino projects. From a certain perspective, the one I'd probably find most aesthetically hideous might be the best one (just stick it by the highway offramps by the stadiums so McCall's friends can drive there, which they won't, because there are other casinos in the "surrounding area" they can go to). But, basically, almost all public policy is directed towards the imagined desires of people who don't actually live in the city. How can we get people to come to the city???

1.5 million people live here.

Grifters Gonna Grift

And not just on the other side.

Late Night

Rock on.

Dinner Thread on the West Coast

Stir fry here with white wine.

Enjoy!

The Big Grift

And on and on.

Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour is a partner in a lobbying firm that works for AshBritt, the giant Florida debris-removal company. He’s also a big backer of Gov. Chris Christie.

After Hurricane Sandy, Barbour played matchmaker. Christie quickly hired AshBritt to help clear New Jersey’s storm-ravaged coastline.

Riding That Tire Swing

Impressed that it's so blatant.

A song for Mark Halperin.



Fade to black.

"Quick! Find Me The Worst Four Humans In Washington!"

Must have been how this started.

Thaw

Superbowl organizers got a bit lucky and it won't be too cold tomorrow. Still I wonder how many people will still be in their seats in the 4th quarter.

Bears Repeating

DDay concurs. Fed ATMs in the post office.