A while back, some local design folks wrote (well, drew) an excellent editorial entitled “The Long Squiggly Line That’s Killing Our Transit System”. I bring this back to your attention not only because it’s a good editorial, but because somebody needs to toss a couple billion copies of it at the fine folks down at the Port Authority.

See, they’re currently working on something called the Transit Development Plan, and as part of it, their market analysis has realized that (gasp!) there is not a good match between where the buses run, where people who use buses live, and where people who use buses want to go. There’s town hall meetings, and there’s even a simplistic online survey, but if my prior experience with PAT town halls is any guide, these are mostly going to be people talking about their ACCESS service. ACCESS is critical, but it’s also not the primary economic function of mass transit. PAT needs to hear from the young professionals and other workers who use the regular bus service, and they need to be told how to use what they have in ways that make more sense. That’d be you, since you’re the type who reads Pittsburgh blogs. Get to work!

Just got back from Chicago and the annual meeting of the American Medical Association; we did our usual round of complaining, but we also sent 400 medical students out into the streets (well, the stadiums) to advocate for the uninsured, and we passed some damn good policy in a number of areas. While there, I encountered an amazing urban innovation: the PayStation (warning, 3MB PDF). It’s a blue-box vending machine, scattered around the city, at which you can pay your parking tickets, city fees, and taxes.

I’m not sure whether this is a stroke of genius or idiocy. I suppose it has the potential to allow elimination of some patronage jobs in City Hall (good luck, given that Chicago’s Democratic politics put us to shame), and it’s nice to be able to pay by credit card without a “convenience fee”, but do people really fail to pay parking tickets simply because there wasn’t a little ATM thingy in their neighborhood? I, at least, generally fail to pay parking tickets because I’m in traffic court explaining to the judge why said ticket is unfair. (3 for 3 thus far, and kudos to the poor judge who sits there all day and listens to sob stories like mine.)

You tell me: would you want to see these things come to Pittsburgh? Me, I’d rather have more Council to Go.

In case you hadn’t heard yet, the big screen outside the Mellon Arena will not be operational for the first two games of the series versus the Red Wings, instead the arena will be opened up and for a five dollar donation to Mario Lemieux Foundation, fans will be able to watch the game on the screens inside.

Parking (surprisingly) is free after 6 at the arena lots, and concessions and various stores will be open as well.  The screen will return for the two home games, May 28 and 31.

 As that good news came through the pipes, the storm from the downtown banners continues to rage.  This morning, the news was that the Penguins had asked the city for permission, but had in fact withdrawn their request since they would not have the banners done in time.  Now, it’s become yet another chapter in the ongoing saga between Ravenstahl and city council. 

I’m sure stories will change at least a few more times.  It would have been nice to have them up for the home games, but I don’t think it was in the cards.  Oh well…now I have to decide if I should come into town on Monday to see the game.  It’s one time I wish I worked on Memorial Day so I could just walk across the street to the game!

Hillary Clinton is in Pittsburgh today hosting a 2 hour panel discussion about 21 century jobs.
Also on the panel are Don Smith (CMU), John Manzetti (Pittsburgh life sciences greenhouse) and Christine Panviocki (VP of Human Resources at Corning).
Some of the concessyion has focused on the challenges of research and develoment. Clinton has talked about the need to expand lab space for research and development.

Photo: Clinton Talks Jobs - panel 1 biotech
Originally uploaded by gophotogo

I happened to be walking down Highland Ave this morning and came across a long, long line of people waiting for Obama tickets.  According to the campaign staff people had been waiting since 9 am.  They started to distribute tickets around noon.  By 2:30 they had given away all of the tickets and there were over 400 people on the waiting list.  Barack Obama will be in Pittsburgh on Friday for a town hall meeting at soldiers and sailors in Oakland.

Jim Russell posted a link to Dick Longworth’s interview on Chigago Public Radio about his new book called, Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism. Dick seems to be thinking about a lot of the things I have since I came to Pittsburgh more than 4 years ago. The entire center of the country seems to be slipping off the global map and losing it’s vital connections to the world, right at the moment it needs them most.

The world only seems to be flat for those regions that are interested in actively embracing it and doing everything they can to stay actively linked to it.

Jim posted this on Rust Belt Bloggers.

Null Space marked the anniversary of the city’s wage tax, one of a series of government policies that seem designed to chase people out of town. This tax comes up in most polls as the number one reason people who live in the region give for not living within the city limits. The result is that in spite of hosting a major chunk of the region’s good jobs, the city is structurally insolvent.

“January 25th, marks the anniversary of Pittsburgh City Council passing the city’s first wage tax on residents in 1954. The wage tax had been pushed by the powers that be for years as a mechanism to keep the tax burden on local industry from increasing.1 That may have worked I suppose, but the consequences on residents are being felt more every year. Given how small the city of Pittsburgh is, even for those who prefer city living it is very easy to still live outside the city proper and escape some or all of the 3% combined city and school district income tax you get hit with just for living in City. I am sure there are people actually living in the city who maintain some other address outside of the city limits just to escape the tax.”

As we all know, ground has now broken on our new casino, and we all look heavenward hoping for the promised property tax relief, which has been promised to come Any Day Now. In the meantime, our own Western PA’s State Senator Jane Orie is striding boldly ahead with the first step towards legal prostitution.

How, you ask, is a sex tax the same thing as legalized prostitution? Look at the businesses listed as being potentially subject to it. Among them are massage parlors and escort services. Now, perhaps you have not read the back pages of the City Paper recently, but if you have, then it’s pretty obvious what both of those industries sell. The cops know this, and for various reasons (some good, some bad) choose to look the other way 99% of the time. If we move to taxing those businesses, we are tacitly admitting that what they do is considered legal and OK. Moreover, we know exactly what happens when our state finds out that it can profit from “sinful” enterprises.

I’ve got very mixed feelings about the whole mess. I like the idea of more money to fight sexual violence, and the libertarian in me is generally in favor of keeping government out of the bedroom. At the same time, sex workers are not always there by choice — they may start out that way, but their “managers” are not always upstanding citizens committed to womens’ rights. It’s almost impossible to stomach the idea of the state profiting from something that lives next door to slavery, no matter how good the cause.

Christina Fong from CMU did a fascinating study of why people support economic and social systems in which they don’t seem to be in their immediate self interest.

“In several studies in recent years, Dr. Fong has found that for many people, achieving fairness in an economic system is almost as important as how much money they make.

The experiments she and others have done show that “income doesn’t matter as much as we think it should.”
“If only income mattered and beliefs about fairness didn’t matter at all, then you should expect to see the world that traditional economists expect you to see, which is that poor people demand redistribution [of tax revenue] and rich people oppose it.”

I personally feel that a lot of the class consciousness in the Pittsburgh region comes from the crazy belief that far too many of the areas powerful people and institutions do not play fair.

The idea is being kicked around in some circles to create incentives to attract high skill immigrants to lower growth areas like the “rust belt”. One of the most common proposals is one to ease the H1B visa quotas to help attract highly educated tech workers into areas in which they are in short supply–such as the rust belt.

Central to the myth of the early industrial age is the idea that it was built on the mass “exploitation” of the poor and unskilled by a small elite of rich people. It’s pretty hard to make that case today, most especially in the old rust belt, which is a region with a both a surplus of low skilled workers and acute shortages of high skill tech workers. It’s pretty common to hear stories of large employers making decisions on where to base huge plants based on the availability of a small number of highly specialized people, many of whom are first generation immigrants. None of the statistical evidence shows that Pittsburgh has a problem retaining its current residents; it does however have a huge problem attracting or retaining new immigrants.