I seldom think of Erie. I have no idea what the city looks like or its culture. It seems isolated from the rest of the Commonwealth.

I was raised mostly near Allentown. The earliest mention of Erie that I can remember is that before the results of the 2000 census, Mayor Heydt of Allentown and whoever was Mayor of Erie then had a bet as to which would be more populous. The Mayor of Erie lost that bet.

I suppose that I might think of Erie as a smaller version of Buffalo, but less fortunate than the larger city, as Buffalo was recorded as having gained population in the 2020 census.

I also occasionally think of Erie as having a station on the high speed rail network that I often fantasize about the United States building. It would be stop on a high-speed version of the former New York Central Water Level route from New York City to Chicago via Upstate New York.

I've suffered this even as a pedestrian. A few months ago I was walking east along Walnut Street toward Broad Street in the early morning when it was still dark and had to squint, because some jackass in an emotional support pick-up truck had his high-beams blazing down the almost empty street toward me.

I've noticed that this has become a common complaint all over. It seems that high-beam etiquette is another casualty of the pandemic. I haven't driven in longer than a decade, but when I did, my understanding was that one should be very careful about interfering with or antagonizing the ability of other motorists to see with high-beams. As with some other courtesies of the road, that seems to have been subsumed by 'fuck it and you too, buddy'.

Yes, he did and more people should and it should be enforced zealously by law enforcement, although McNesby's slobbering goons are not likely to ever show that modest commitment to the public good.

If you disagree, well you're a bad person and should go live in Jersey. Philadelphia would be better off without your decidedly inferior kind.

Arguably, there is only one vote, it's simply transferred among candidates until there is a majority winner. Interestingly, there are variant counting methods for the single transferable vote, which is the multiple-winner version of 'RCV' and actually preceded it, wherein votes are counted fractionally, so one vote may count for multiple candidates, but only partially.

Closer to 'unlimited votes' would be something like range voting and arguably approval voting.

Even accepting your complaint, two basic questions arise.

1. Why should, "1 man one vote' dictate what is acceptable in voting systems.
2. Do you consider Australia and Ireland, which uses ranked voting systems universally, to be undemocratic or otherwise defective?

I approve of this. I was a Commonwealth Civil Servant, albeit 'Management Level'^(*), for nearly six years and although most of my peers held bachelor's degrees and I have a master's degree, there are many intermediate-grade positions (I would say as high as a five or six) that I think that many high school graduates could have succeeded in. Some of them would probably be able to attain higher positions. Given that Commonwealth positions are not exceedingly well-compensated, they're probably better suited to people not carrying student loan debt.

Somebody in my former department in a similar position who was a grade above me in fact had no college degree.

I would prefer that society be less 'credentialist' in general.

I don't know how much effect this will really have, but I think that it's a reasonable policy and perhaps good politics too.

^(*'Management level* employees are not necessarily managers and most are not. I was just a drone myself. Many personnel in budget offices, for example, are 'Management Level'. It's ostensibly for personnel who are in policy development positions. They are are also not allowed to join a union, although they do have civil service protections, an are not paid for working extra hours, which occasionally happens. There are also paid according to a separate MA payscale, which was in fact lower paid than standard (ST payscale employees when I started, as they had been denied pay increases in the aftermath of the great recession with their only advantage being accumulating annual leave slightly faster in their first few years of service. Governor Wolf later unified the payscales.))

I continue to be impressed by Jay Arzu's success in promoting the Roosevelt Boulevard Subway. I remain pessimistic about its prospects, because I am me and this is Philadelphia, but he has taken it from opinion columns to something with a little actual enthusiasm and political support in less than a year. That's a considerable accomplishment.

I'm a little skeptical of the wisdom of making the Market-Frankford Subway-Elevated connection essential to the plan, because it will entail a considerable added cost. Admittedly, I might be biased by my own silly fantasy of a branch from the MFSE along Oxford and Castor Avenues, replacing the route #59 trackless trolley, to a point in Rhawnhurst.

Part of the problem is that it's means of access to Center City has been eliminated. It was formerly a Reading Company freight branch that went to the Reading Terminal, but that connection was destroyed by I-676.

I also recall reading that part of it would be or has been taken over for a parking lot. That is perhaps a surmountable obstacle, but a nuisance all the same.

Its proximity to Brewerytown and the Art museum make it an excellent candidate for transit. A dedicated is probably the least difficult alternative, but I can't stop dreaming of using it as a rail alignment of some kind.

I work with somebody who lives on Wendover Street who has been complaining about how dangerous it is and has told me of such awful things happening before. We've built parts of our modern civilization to be real meat grinders.

Well damn it all! I've found Jonathan Best very useful on occasion and found its presence reassuring. I appreciate the restaurants and specialty vendors at Reading Terminal Market, but like when it has more generalist vendors. This is a regrettable loss. I can only hope that something new takes its place soon enough.

There are several large, promising projects planned or being built in the vicinity of Spring Garden Station, as those tower cranes portend, which I imagine are in significant part attributable to its presence.

Unfortunately, Spring Garden Station sucks. It's not compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act and even if that doesn't stop you, it sits in the middle of the Delaware Expressway and is reached from miserable, uninviting even outright hostile entrances. It's far better that a station be there than not, but not by as much as it should. I'm not even sure how it could be feasibly made accessible and inviting. Neither of those are traits of highways, which largely define the area and station.

I failed to meet one or two personal goals, but had some satisfying professional success, was lucky that my new manager is somebody whom I was able to develop a good relationship with, continued to never contract Covid-19 and received a nice pay raise to end the year. Meanwhile, the city, although still beset by problems and burdened with a worse-than-useless political class, is far from the emptied-out Hellscape that I had feared during lockdown that it would become and every day that passed meant that there were fewer days remaining in Mayor Kenney's tenure, which is an accumulation of blessings.

So, although I am melancholy by nature, I think that it went pretty well from where I'm standing.

I work in a job writing grant applications. I use the term, "community," an awful lot and that has begun to make me wonder if it's just a polite way of saying, "keep the wrong kind of people out," in a way that hurts the city at large more than any given neighborhood could ever suffer.

It's very taboo in certain circles to think that, but I increasingly think that it's close to true or that worrying about gentrification elevates a few particular interests over the greater interest of the city, including those who might be commonly considered the victims of gentrification.

Philadelphia has long had extraordinary potential. Unfortunately, it has a political establishment that wants to fuck that up, because it prefers rot and decline that it controls to growth and change that won't be beholden to it.

Thank you, you're doing the Lord's work. My brain kept acting like a record player hitting a scratch as I tried to understand the title.

I leave town for two days and this happens.

That said, this seems unrelated to the actual problems that probably underlie the headline homicide count. This happened in a hotel where I've stayed and passed on my way to Suburban Station on Saturday, but doesn't change my sense of safety in Center City. I'm still reasonably sure that I'll be reduced to spaghetti Bolognese by a motorist who decided to interpret a red light generously.

Twenty nine units almost literally on top of a subway station is pretty disappointing. I would like to see something at least in the range of double to triple as many apartments.

I suppose that I shouldn't be surprised by this unambitious proposal. The land use along much of Broad Street and most of the zoning have never really reflected the transit assets serving it.

It's probably an accident of history. I haven't done a detailed historical analysis, but a casual look at the list of Mayors since the Act of Consolidation suggests that they have been elected in odd years since the middle of the nineteenth century.

The possibility of somebody being elected Mayor of Philadelphia ultimately by winning a fraction of the primary vote makes me uneasy. That just doesn't seem like democracy in a substantive way.

I don't believe that the next Mayor will win with as outrageously small of a vote share of 11 % or whatever the necessary minimum turns out to be, but it could still conceivably be quite small. Philadelphia isn't going to become Peru, but the shiftless failure that Jim Kenney turned out to be and a primary election that seems poised to give somebody executive office with a dubious mandate should be a clear sign that the system is bad.

Tangentially, Helen Gym should fire her graphic designer. Her logo looks like it belongs on the side of those coolers at gas stations that you buy bags of ice out of.

Are you expressing incredulity at the relevance of climate change to snowfall, which is... part of the climate?

It does not seem so unreasonable that, "everything," or at least a lot of things would relate to climate change somehow. The effects of climate are persistent, deep and pervasive. Things like how cold it will be or how much rain will fall, which are very basic and important climactic considerations, are pretty important.

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This, which I say as somebody otherwise uninterested in professional sports, is the kind of thing that South Broad Street, among other places, is for.

Well, for one thing, it was two paragraphs.

So, may I assume that you are martiny236, P.E.?

I would suppose that whatever work is being done was planned and scheduled a long time ago, which is typical of capital projects, and could not practically take the possibility of a particular major sporting event into consideration.

There are probably contracts, allocations of resources and long-term plans that are bult around the assumption of this work being done. What's more, as winter is approaching, suspending or cancelling the work could potentially delay it until next spring, which might disrupt other planned work premised upon the work being at least partially completed and the resources used in it available for other planned work. Not undertaking the work now could cause cascading problems some ways into the future.