April 27, 2004
Building transit centers
Although developers are fuming about the approval of the Transbay Terminal Environmental Impact Report, construction goes full-bore near BART.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch: the Governator seeks to "borrow" from transit funds to feed the state's sapped resources:
His budget proposal would transfer nearly another $2 billion in transportation funds to the state's general fund by suspending Prop. 42, which voters approved in 2002 and devotes sales taxes paid on gasoline to highway and transit improvements.
... In addition, the budget proposal also would end the Transportation Congestion Relief Program, the 181 projects that were guaranteed funding by Proposition 42 from the gas tax until 2008.
"It would be like a highway pileup,'' said Randy Rentschler, spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the Bay Area's transportation planning agency. "Some projects could be salvaged; a lot couldn't.''
In doing so, he borrows from the Gray Davis playbook: Davis took about $2 billion from the state's transportation funds as well.
Why is BART under-used?
Will the Transbay rejuvenate public transit throughout the Bay Area? In California?
H is for hapax legomenon.
When I was seven or eight, I read an odd book: I cannot recall the title, but remember that the cover illustration had a gaudy painting of a dark room with a brain in a jar, and a boy standing in studied amazement. The story told of the young boy and his relationship with the brain, which could answer anything; one of the curious bits of trivia it knew as that Jane Austen's posthumously-published Northanger Abbey makes the first printed reference to rounders as "base ball".
What is the technical term for the first occurrence of a word or phrase?
Karen Joy Fowler has written a book in the first-person plural, titled The Jane Austen Book Club.