Posts about Government

Airbnb, for example, lets you rent out your apartment when you're not there for extra cash, and makes it possible to find a much more affordable place to stay in busy cities where there aren't that many hotel rooms.

Regulations, however, often don't really account for individuals renting out their own stuff. They usually assume that anyone providing such services is a company that does so as its business, and can undergo inspections, file for permits, and so on. Plus, these regulatory processes try to ensure that the products are safe and healthy, that nobody's getting scammed, and so on.

The new-style collaborative consumption startups are solving the consumer protection problem in a bottom-up, social-media way: people rate buyers and sellers, and a strong reputation replaces a regulator's review. This is what eBay did to give people confidence in buying things from strangers instead of from stores or established catalog companies.

There are the occasional horror stories, but then, regulators miss things, too. But Airbnb is illegal in most cities, and some cities are cracking down, often at the behest of the hotel industry or neighbors who don't like strangers coming and going. Mainly the transactions happen outside the law's blessing, it's making buyers and sellers happy, not causing a lot of trouble, and eventually cities will probably adjust laws to come to terms with it.

What does this mean for ride sharing? Taxi rides are a particularly heavily-regulated area, with powerful driver lobbies that want to restrict the supply of rides. They weren't happy about Uber, and really won't be happy with ride sharing.

Plus, regulators have some legitimate fears. Cars can be really dangerous. Is it important to give people assurance they're riding in a safe one? You're under the physical control of another person. How can we be sure that person isn't going to do bad things? A woman has accused an Uber driver of raping her; police investigated, but prosecutors aren't pressing charges.

Are these roles the government should play? With Uber, many people argued that regulators ought to ensure the driver is well trained, properly licensed, and not a threat. They should ensure the car is safe and well-maintained. But don't regulate the prices, since people can choose to ride Uber or not and don't need the government to decide how much it should cost.

Now, ride sharing companies are essentially trying to take the next step. Must the drivers all have commercial licenses and commercial vehicles? Or can we let anyone sign up to give others rides? Can the companies, like SideCar, self-regulate?

Certainly it's in SideCar's, and Airbnb's, and Uber's interest to be sure everyone is safe. SideCar has extensive safety information on its site. One theory is that these companies will make sure it's safe, or else go out of business. After all, it's easy to spread a bad experience on Twitter, so even a small number of problems could earn the company a bad reputation.

The DC Taxicab Commission isn't ready to embrace this. Having just created regulations for sedan drivers that regulate much less than they are used to, they'll need more outside pressure if they're going to let ridesharing get an even lighter regulatory touch. And should they?

The currently-proposed regulations are their fourth revision. Rather than focusing public safety, they micromanage when and where individual food trucks can operate. But food trucks have been successful in large part because they quickly respond to consumer needs by changing menus and locations.

Most of downtown would be permanently off-limits under the new regulations, aside from a handful allowed to operate in designated "mobile roadway vending locations."

The regulations themselves do not create a single MRV location. Instead, they allow DC's Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs (DCRA) to propose locations and the number of food trucks that can operate in each one, subject to review by the District Department of Transportation.

The regulations also allow the director of either agency, on his or her own, "the discretion to propose, modify, or remove a designated MRV location at any time." This does not protect consumers from any actual harm. Given how popular food trucks are, it's not clear which, if any, public interest is being addressed by the regulations.

Helder Gil, DCRA's legislative affairs specialist, has stated that the regulations are an attempt to "find something that works for everyone." This is a misguided goal. Many restaurateurs would prefer a downtown free from competitors, but it makes as much sense to give restaurants input on where food trucks can operate as it does to give food trucks control over prices restaurants can charge.

In heeding the concerns of restaurants, DCRA has strayed from the traditionally-accepted role of crafting regulations to preserve public health by attempting to control competition between businesses.

It's also clear that restaurants and food trucks can coexist. While food trucks have the advantages of mobility, low overhead, and convenience, restaurants have the advantages of seating, climate control, and larger kitchens. When restaurants and food trucks compete for customers by playing to their strengths, consumers win. When businesses thrive by regulating competitors out existence, consumers lose.

DCRA should completely scrap the latest proposed regulations. Instead, simpler regulations should bring food trucks into a legal status without giving local officials power to stifle competition. DCRA should issue a mobile vending license for any truck that meets the already-existing standards for cleanliness and safety.

These licenses should permit trucks to park in any available spot in a commercial zone, allowing them to operate near their customers. The cost of the license, in the range of a few hundred dollars per month, would bring in more revenue than trucks currently pay by feeding parking meters.

By keeping food truck regulations simple and rule-based, we can ensure that restaurants and food trucks compete on an even playing field. By removing discretion from the regulations, we can ensure that consumers, not competitors or officials, are in control.

If you would like to share your input on the proposed food truck regulations, send your thoughts to DCVendingRegs@dc.gov by 5 pm on Monday, April 8th.

The Examiner's strength was cranking out a lot of articles on many subjects. Since the start of 2012, we have included Examiner articles 284 times in Breakfast Links, second only to 531 Washington Post mentions (third is City Paper, fourth DCist). Our policy is to link to the article that has the best and/or most complete original reporting on a subject, so the high number of mentions means a lot.

Examiner doggedly pushed war on non-cars

However, on bicycling and transit, the editors repeatedly took reasonable articles, placed inflammatory headlines atop them, and splashed them on the front page.

DCist even started mocking the way the front page editors juxtaposed angry anti-city headlines on the top with large pictures that illustrated other articles below. Most recently, they matched up Pope Benedict with driving being "hell."

The Examiner delivers paper copies for free to suburban households periodically (I believe once a week), and at least the last "war on cars" front-pager, by Eric Newcomer, was on the distribution day. It's hard not to see this as propaganda designed to enrage suburbanites against the city (and maybe drive up subscription numbers).

Certainly an article whose headline proclaims "D.C. waging war against drivers" is not seriously attempting to educate anyone. Newcomer's piece wasn't quite as bad as the headline, but he did clearly set out only to identify costs to drivers, a one-sided approach. Further, someone Newcomer called about the story told me that Newcomer had approached him specifically for comments for a story on the "war on cars"; the assignment was slanted from the start.

If AAA had a point of view, you could usually count on an Examiner article which quoted AAA heavily, then maybe added a token quote or two from the police or the mayor's representatives. Alan Blinder's article today is a classic case: it leads with a dollar figure they got from AAA DC officials, then has some quotes from AAA spokesman John Townsend, followed by a couple quotes from the mayor's representatives, and then closes with AAA talking points again.

Examiner reporters almost never spoke to pedestrian or bicycle safety advocates for these stories. Every story about cameras got the frame, city officials versus drivers. The people who get killed on the roads don't exist. Unfortunately, Ashley Halsey III's articles in the Washington Post are the same way; cameras are just "lucrative" and not "life-saving."

Ledes emphasized "what you pay" over "what you get"

Moreover, Examiner articles frequently confronted any budgetary issue by leading with what it would cost taxpayers rather than the benefits. For example, a Maryland House committee yesterday approved a proposal to increase sales taxes on gas. This will have two effects: people will pay more for gas, and Maryland will get more transportation infrastructure that it needs.

This morning's article on the proposal, by Andy Brownfield, leads off with the costs and makes no mention of benefits. Yet Brownfield made the time to quote conservative opponents, a form of balance that we rarely see on AAA stenography articles.

This form of journalistic bias, which frames any government proposal in terms of harm to taxpayers much more strongly than benefits to residents, was common at the Examiner and reflected its editorial views.

I wish I could say the Washington Post's article on this subject, this time by John Wagner, was better—but it's not.

Spent $10 too much on pencils? Front page story!

The more money any organization spends, public or private, the more often some piece of that spending won't quite stand up to close scrutiny. With government, we need to have the press playing a watchdog role. The Examiner did more of this than anyone.

With the pressure to come up with stories on spending, however, this often went too far. The paper would relentlessly FOIA budget documents from everyone (except state DOTs, whose road projects they didn't look at too closely) and write a headline about almost any kind of spending.

Sometimes that spending is really inappropriate, and it's the press's duty to call attention to it. Sometimes, the numbers just sound high when you drop a dollar figure on the front page without context, but actually make sense. Or sometimes, the spending might be inappropriate, but it's really a tiny issue, and maybe the cost of adding more accounting controls is even higher.

This focus on waste also obscures another serious problem with government: not getting things done. Take Ken Archer's recent exposé about the DC Department of Employment Services and the One-Stop job centers. Their process puts up so many obstacles to getting training, such as proving residency, which are so arduous that many job seekers end up dropping out and not getting any training.

I couldn't help but wonder: if DOES fixed the process to make sure that more people got training, inevitably here and there some person might get training who isn't eligible. If the Examiner found out, even if that's a negligible number of people, it'd be front-page news about how the program is wasteful.

The biggest problems with DDOT projects is not waste, but procurement delays. It's just so hard to get anything done. We have exhaustive processes to ensure not a single dollar gets spent without review, bidding, and on and on. In practice, that means that staff spend so much time trying to move their projects through the financial process that they have too little time for actual design, community engagement, and more.

The main burden for all of these flaws should fall on editors rather than the reporters. Some reporters were better than others, but editors write the headlines and choose what to put on the front page, not the reporters. Editors assign subjects and push the reporters to write more or less on certain topics.

We can hope that the good reporters there find new jobs. In fact, they deserve to get better jobs working for editors who are actually trying to run a journalistic enterprise. I've long wished that reporters like them could work for a better paper; now, hopefully, is the chance.

Update: The original version of this article said that AAA sent the dollar figures to Alan Blinder for his story, but the story says they came from DC officials. Many articles in the preceding week did get their numbers directly from AAA, like Ashley Halsey's, and AAA has been sending around press releases with these or similar figures, but this particular story did not specifically get the numbers from AAA.

A mix of at-large and districts has many benefits

Districts do have an advantage. If all councilmembers were elected at large, they could easily all be from one part of the county. There would be no guarantee of diversity or adequate representation for all parts of the county.

DC also has a mixed system, with 8 wards, 4 at-large members and one chairman at large as well.

All 5 of Arlington's members are at large, and despite this they end up representing many parts of the county. However, Arlington is a much smaller county in land area—the "geographically smallest self-governing county in the United States," in fact.

Districts ensure that each part of the county will have a representative on the Council. But it also tends to make a council more parochial. Each member has his or her own little fiefdom that the others leave alone. Districts also give each councilmember less incentive to worry about things that affect only other districts.

Does this system hold Prince George's back on growth?

Prince George's County has lagged behind the rest of the region in building transit-oriented development and fostering economic development.

It's become clear that while Prince George's has learned to talk about TOD with the right terms, it hasn't learned that it has to make choices in order to make TOD work.

The Greenbelt Sector Plan, which was just adopted by the Council, is a perfect example. The plan seeks to lay the groundwork for building transit-oriented development at Greenbelt station and transforming the shopping centers at Beltway Plaza and Greenway Center into walkable, mixed-use nodes.

But the plan also calls for widening the roads that go through the middle of those nodes. Widening the roads is not necessary because of traffic that comes from the planned development; rather, they allow for continued development in the suburban and rural parts of the county east of Greenbelt.

Furthermore, the county continues to approve projects like Konterra and Westphalia in the suburbs, which take retail demand away from the urban parts of the county inside the Beltway. One reason that TOD at Greenbelt station has been so difficult to get going is because Konterra has sucked up a lot of the retail demand.

As long as the Council is more interested in making sure that development comes to each district rather than making sure it goes where the infrastructure exists to handle it, the county will not get the TOD it so desperately needs. And any economic development that comes along will be spread inefficiently and unsustainably across the county.

Restructuring the council to include several at-large members would give the council a greater stake at making all of Prince George's better, rather than just their district.

And it would make each citizen a constituent of a majority of the council. That should make government more responsive, something sorely needed in Prince George's.

Upper Marlboro is on the far eastern edge of Prince George's County. The courthouse, in fact, is only 2 miles from the border with Anne Arundel County.

That means that for many residents, it is a long, tedious trip to the county seat to testify before the council or otherwise participate in events at the county's administrative center.

For those with a car, it's a long trip. For those without a car, it is a long, and at some times, impossible trip. The last bus leaves Upper Marlboro bound for Addison Road station at 6:40 pm. If you want to testify at the council after that, you'll need a car.

When I was called for jury duty last year, I had to borrow a car to get there. Jurors are expected at 7:30. For people living in the northern end of the county, that means catching the 6:30 bus from New Carrollton. And if your bus doesn't get to New Carrollton by 6:30, you're out of luck. For example, the first bus from the north end of Greenbelt doesn't get to New Carrollton until 6:49.

Upper Marlboro is not central

Upper Marlboro is not particularly close to the geographical center of Prince George's County. The geographical centroid (the average latitude and longitude of all points in the county) is just northeast of Andrews Air Force Base, just over 5 miles west of Upper Marlboro.

Of Maryland's 23 county seats, Upper Marlboro is the 9th most distant from the geographical centroid of its county. The worst is Oakland, over 10 miles from Garrett County's center. On the other hand, Denton is less than a half mile from the center of Caroline County. The state average is 3.97 miles.

More important than geographic centrality is that the seat is close and accessible to the populace. In that regard, Upper Marlboro fares much more poorly.

Upper Marlboro is 9.66 miles from the county's 2010 centroid of population (the average latitude and longitude of each resident's home in the county). That's the 2nd largest, after only Worcester County (home of Ocean City).

The distance between population centroids and county seats ranges from a high of 12.83 miles in Worcester County to a low of just 0.32 miles in Caroline County. The statewide average is 4.02 miles.

The 2010 population centroid of Prince George's County is near the intersection of Martin Luther King, Jr Highway and Sheriff Road in the Landover area. This is about halfway between the Cheverly (Orange Line) and Morgan Boulevard (Blue Line) Metro stations.

If we compare this to Montgomery County, we find that Rockville is only 1.75 miles from the population centroid and 4.51 miles from the geographic centroid of the county.

County	County seat	Miles to pop. centroid	Miles to geo. centroid
Allegany	Cumberland	3.74	3.76
Anne Arundel	Annapolis	8.42	6.32
Baltimore County	Towson	1.74	5.15
Calvert	Prince Frederick	2.49	1.26
Caroline	Denton	0.32	0.47
Carroll	Westminster	3.69	1.45
Cecil	Elkton	6.16	6.60
Charles	La Plata	3.10	2.20
Dorchester	Cambridge	3.67	6.27
Frederick	Frederick	0.78	2.93
Garrett	Oakland	8.56	10.38
Harford	Bel Air	2.10	2.37
Howard	Ellicott City	4.17	5.50
Kent	Chestertown	1.97	3.34
Montgomery	Rockville	1.75	4.51
Prince George's	Upper Marlboro	9.66	5.01
Queen Anne's	Centreville	4.70	3.45
Somerset	Princess Anne	5.58	6.34
St. Mary's	Leonardtown	3.40	1.75
Talbot	Easton	1.52	0.95
Washington	Hagerstown	1.67	5.53
Wicomico	Salisbury	0.46	1.58
Worcester	Snow Hill	12.83	4.22

Time for a change?

The population centroid is a contantly-changing point on the map.

In 1920, for example, the population centroid for Montgomery County was located north of Rockville. By 1960, it had moved as far south as Garrett Park, as the downcounty area urbanized. But then the wave of population growth moved north, and pulled the centroid with it.

In Prince George's County, since suburbanization began with streetcars in the early 1900s, growth has always stayed close to the DC boundary. Even as sprawling neighborhoods began to appear throughout Prince George's, the density of the close-in neighborhoods means that the population centroid has stayed close to DC.

Because so many Prince Georgeans live in the northern part of the county and close to the DC border, moving the county seat could make it easier for county residents to get involved in their government.

The county has already taken steps to move some departments to Largo, including the county's Department of Public Works & Transportation.

Prince George's should continue that trend, and moving the County Council should be a top priority.

If Largo were the county seat, it would be about the same distance from the geographical center of the county (5.16 miles instead of 5.01 miles), but it would be much closer to the population centroid (2.79 miles away instead of 9.66 miles).

Additionally, a seat in Largo would be much more accessible to residents without access to cars. Largo has a Metro station, and is a transit hub for several bus routes. Transit service there lasts almost until midnight, as opposed to shutting down at dinner time, as it does in Upper Marlboro.

A seat with Metro service would also put Prince George's in the same category as some of the other counties in the region. DC, Arlington, Alexandria, and Montgomery all have Metro-accessible seats.

Upper Marlboro is very inconveniently located. It's time Prince George's stopped asking its residents to slog more than halfway across the county just to participate in local government.

Especially when hidden behind a keyboard, some people apparently feel free to unload their frustrations in ways that far overshoot the bounds of civility.

Over just the past several months, my agency and I have been called insulting, negligent, cowardly, incompetent, inadequate, frustrating, cheap, clueless, mouthpieces, cowardly, villains, obstructionist, inferior, demeaning, unwilling, empty and inconsequential. My boss, a member of my staff and I were told repeatedly and publicly that we should resign or be fired. Note that all of this came from a single customer.

My message to those who say things like this is simple: knock it off. Government isn't something that happens to people without their active involvement, and government employees are not the help. When they fail you or give you an answer you don't like, they're not working to make your life less pleasant on purpose.

At their best, I believe this is a group of people called to serve a greater good. Even at their worst, even if only motivated by a desire to earn a paycheck at a steady and stable job, they deserve no more ire or disrespect than any other professional in a different line of work. Would you direct words like these at a doctor, a grocery cashier or a dog walker? Hardly.

The other problem with this uncivil discourse is that it tends to be aimed squarely at people who either didn't cause the problem or are actively trying to fix it. Taking the present management of an agency to task for something their predecessors didn't do decades ago is neither fair nor wise—especially when they are doing it now.

It is not the DMV clerk's fault that the law requires a certain type of document to prove your identity. And the workers standing calf-deep in cold water to fix the pipe outside your house didn't cause it to break and interrupt your water service. Yelling at them not only demoralizes people who are working to help, but distracts them from doing the actual helping. Folks, it's really time to stop berating the surgical team while they're standing over the bleeding patient.

What if we instead approached our public servants with kindness, patience and gratitude? My suspicion is that we'd end up with happier people, less burnout and better government as a result.

It has been nearly 8 years, but I will always remember the words of one particularly grateful constituent in Columbia Heights long after I forget her name or the service I performed on her behalf. She wrote, "You have single-handedly restored my faith in the institution of government."

At the time, I took great comfort in her words and hung them on my cubicle wall as a shining example of what I wished I heard more often. Today, I realize that if one's faith—or lack of faith—in the institution of government depends on the actions of a single person, government's relationship to its constituents is precarious at best. Even though improving that relationship isn't my job as an employee anymore, it will always be my job as a private citizen.

And I owe those on the other side of the service window, the phone line or the email inbox the same courtesy I hope they will extend to me.

She says:

Planning directors, if they don't push to change anything, they might have job security, but literally nothing changes in their city. They look behind them and there's nobody behind them. In the job you're constantly out there pushing, but not so hard that no one is willing to support what you're trying to do.

Government is risk averse, right? I mean, really risk averse, and fearful of failure, because you might end up on the front page of the Washington Post.

But I think more and more cities are coming to recognize that not only is it important that they have innovators in their cities but that they be innovators, and be willing to try new things. And if they fail, fail fast.

She then talks about how Capital Bikeshare is actually DC's second bike sharing system, which we put in after the first, SmartBike, wasn't a success. She concludes, "Innovation is about failing. You have to fail sometimes, otherwise you're not trying hard enough to do something interesting, and there has to be some tolerance for it."

One clear prerequisite for a government official to be pushing for change is having a boss who understands this. An official is going to take action and some people will be upset. Does the boss (whether a mid-level manager, agency director, or mayor) just rebuke the employee simply because his or her actions generated angry emails? Or does he or she look more deeply at the issue to determine whether the employee is actually doing something good?

This tolerance also has to apply to the public. When we look at a project like a new bike lane, very soon after it opens you see blog comments and press articles about whether it's a success or failure. But the 15th Street bike lane started out as one-way, and DDOT then switched it to 2-way. Pennsylvania Avenue still needs fixes to stop U-turns.

Certainly, at some point we do have to look back at programs and decide if they worked or not. There has to be a point where we judge a pilot program, or else we can't learn from the experience. But, as Tregoning is saying, if some of the programs are failures, that's not a sign of mismanagement or waste. We can't respond to everything not being perfect by calling for "heads to roll" or something of that nature.

"Fail fast" is a hot concept in technology startups. The idea is to try a lot of things, but quickly decide whether they are working or not. Many startups have gone through 2, 3, 5, or 10 different products before they hit on a good one. Twitter arose when its founders were building a podcasting service.

A startup is not the same as the government, though. The startup can squander investors' money and it's only the investors who lose out. A government program uses taxpayer money, and people hold that to a higher standard.

The problem is that it doesn't actually save money to do everything extremely slowly. Take procurement, which Mayor Gray promised to fix in last night's State of the District address. We have enormous layers upon layers of controls and approvals to make sure that government contracts aren't being given out based on bribes, or frivolously, or at unreasonably high rates.

We do need to guard against this, but the effect is a system so ponderous that important initiatives can sit around for a year just waiting to go ahead. A simple study of the H and I Street bus lanes took about 9 months to go through procurement at WMATA. I was hearing about moveDC for a long, long time before it happened, because of procurement delays. There are some exciting things folks in DDOT have told me about that I'd love to see move ahead yesterday, except they have to sit around for an indeterminate length of time.

Some things you can't easily redo if you do them wrong. Design a building with poor architecture and you're stuck with its flaws for a long, long time. What governments need to get better about doing is distinguishing those projects where you have to get everything right the first time, like building a bridge, from the ones you can scrap or modify much more easily, like a bike lane or CaBi, or an education initiative, or even a lot of zoning changes.

Meanwhile, we're fortunate to have a planning director who would say this. A lot of great officials have nonetheless decided to prioritize job security over boldness, maybe with good reason. We need to particularly value the ones who still want so badly to make the city better that they are willing to take risks.

The Chinatown buses were able to flourish for two reasons: A loophole in parking rules allowed buses to idle on certain streets in Chinatown, and Ronald Reagan's Bus Regulatory Reform Act of 1982, which made it easier for interstate buses to pick up passengers and set rates as they pleased. By eliminating the costs of infrastructure, amenities and marketing, the Chinatown buses only have to pay for a fleet of buses, a limited staff and gas; this translates into $10 fares from New York to Boston.

Major operators like Greyhound caught on, leading them to develop the BoltBus, which follows the Chinatown bus model and is nearly as cheap, seemingly a lot safer and has reliable wi-fi. This is how the market is supposed to work in favor of people: Increasing the options for consumers and thereby lowering prices.

But that's not how it usually works in transportation. As someone who believes that strong regulation is incredibly important for industries such as Wall Street, which is literally tied to the economy of the rest of the world, or the energy industry, whose impacts on the environment can be irreversible, I also believe that transportation regulation at all levels of government is holding our cities and our economy back.

In many cities around the country, people are marooned by public transit that is often unreliable, infrequent, unsafe or just nonexistent. Private providers find it nearly impossible to supply alternatives. A start-up website called Uber that allows people to hail a licensed black taxi, recently was set up in a sting operation in Washington, DC by the local taxi commissioner for failing to comply with District regulations. Regulation has zeroed out private alternatives to public transit in cities, forcing people to take transit into their own hands—or, more accurately, into their own cars.

But what if there were other options? In New York, which has transit options that any other American city would envy, there's such great density that it supports many more niche transit options. "Dollar vans," which largely fly under the regulatory radar, are a popular service for many people in Brooklyn.

These kinds of systems called colectivos flourish in Latin and South America, as well as other regions of the world, where private cars and public transportation fail to meet users' needs.

A lack of competition in transportation options has caused all transit modes to be more expensive than they need to be. Why should an Amtrak from Philadelphia to New York routinely cost $45? A private Japanese company has just opened an office in Texas with plans to amass $10 billion to support a high-speed line between Houston and Dallas-Ft. Worth—one imagines that will beat Amtrak not just in terms of price, but speed of completing the project.

If we opened our streets and rails more transportation operators, undoubtedly it would benefit our intertwined problems of high prices, congestion and slow service. But just last Friday, the New York State supreme court thwarted Mayor Michael Bloomberg's attempt to sell more than $1 billion worth of taxi medallions that would have increased taxi service in underserved boroughs and allowed for street hailing.

To be sure, the idea of deregulated transportation sounds bad. Deregulated transportation in many developing countries is notoriously unsafe and can have grave consequences. But there needs to be a middle ground between rolling death traps and a transportation system that is killing our economy. New York Sen. Chuck Schumer's proposal of creating a clearly posted letter-grade system to identify the quality of Chinatown bus services is a great one; this model could be applied to other kinds of new transit providers that serve niche markets. Auctioning off transportation licenses or city-owned property to support infrastructure for alternative transportation modes could be a new source of revenue in other cash-strapped cities.

The Chinatown bus companies emerged from strong immigrant communities with an entrepreneurial work ethic; while the practices that prompted government intervention seem shady, let's not forget this country needs this kind of ingenuity to survive and our government should be working its hardest to support those who have found ways to bring new, inexpensive transportation options to our roads and rails.

Cross-posted at Next American City.