Cities ain't where it's at if you're a Republican Congressman, and so, neither is transit...

2004-11-11-cover, The Stranger
Originally uploaded by rllayman

The blog I attempted to create years ago, Urban Agenda, was to be focused on developing an urban agenda that could be entered into the foray inPresidential campaigns. It was intended to be a group blog, but unlike David Alpert's wildly successful effort at bringing together good people in to write for Greater Greater Washington, I wasn't able to pull it off.

Yonah Freemark's Transport Politic has a superb post, "Understanding the Republican Party’s Reluctance to Invest in Transit Infrastructure," about the spatial representation patterns of members of the House of Representatives in the US Congress, and how urban representation tends to be Democrat, while Republicans tend to represent suburban and exurban areas.

This isn't a good time to be pushing sustainable transportation policies, given the control of the House of Representatives by the Republican party.

The image is from the cover story, "The Urban Archipeligo" from Seattle's Stranger alternative newspaper after the results of the 2004 Presidential election. It recognized a similar city vs. suburbs/exurbs breakdown in the results of that election, and proposed that the Democratic party refocus on the center cities and the development of an urban agenda.

The 2008 presidential election was somewhat anomalous as inner suburbs voted Democratic more than in the 2010 election. I attribute that to piss poor narrative and organizing on the part of the Democrats. Hopefully, this won't be repeated in 2012.