What I learned on my Thanksgiving vacation

Eighteen years ago, my family moved from southern Louisiana to a quaint little town of less than 30,000 people just north of Houston. Back then, the big controversy in those parts was about whether the soon to open McDonald’s would suck all the charm out of this homey little community. A number of vocal residents felt that this was just not the sort of business we wanted in town, and that if it were allowed to open, it would mark the first step on the road to becoming just another corporate hellhole suburb.

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Nancy Nadel fiddling with JLS mixed use parking permits

Nancy Nadel has requested some changes (PDF!) to the Jack London Square mixed use parking permit program which will come before the Finance & Management Commitee next week. Residents of the area who spent years trying to get the permits are, to put it mildly, not thrilled. More at Jack London News: Read more

Your tax dollars at work

So if you drive a car or ride a bicycle to get around Oakland, you probably have an opinion on the city’s new pay and display parking kiosks (PDF!). If you walk everywhere, then you don’t care about parking meters, and you’re probably sick of listening to people complain about how you can’t leave extra time behind for the next person to come along, or how you have to walk all the way down the block and back to pay, or how the new kiosks are totally unfair to motorcycles, or how the city is just trying to squeeze extra money from us, or whatever other problems people might have. Read more