At Pundicity, Bostonian Jeff Jacoby compares a city that builds to one that doesn’t. Dallas, Jacoby notes, has unapologetically expanded its road system and, consequently, the average Dallas resident wastes just 44 hours per year stuck in traffic. That’s barely half the average time spent idling in Jacoby’s famously congested hometown whose leaders, he notes pointedly, despise the automobile and halted major roadbuilding 50 years ago.
Blueprint for Alberta?
Writing in Jewish World Review, Frederic Fransen reminds Americans of a key lesson from Revolutionary War-era pamphleteer Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. “The colonies need to declare independence,” Fransen summarizes Paine, “because so long as their goal was seen as reconciliation, foreign governments would consider the Americans as rebels and the conflict an internal affair.” But a unilateral declaration of independence, Fransen notes, instantly converts mere complaints from an aggrieved group into a negotiation between sovereign states.
