bigredmed wrote: Welcome to St Louis.
Thanks. Ironically. I'll most likely be moving there this summer.
With OPS circling the drain, North Omaha's chronic violence, and the general "toys for girls and boys" attitude towards public spending, you would rapidly fail. Some judge would order mandatory fees to 66 and other burb schools to pay for toys for boys instead of "schools with rules" to attract kids to more magnet like programs like in KCMO (which failed to bring out the judicially ordered changes), and the people will find the nearest impenetrable border to cross, and them move there (to wit Kansas) to avoid the judge's rose colored orders. Enjoy.
Those are some rather extreme and specific examples set up by terrible government and planning ideas at the beginning of the century. There's also Minneapolis, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco, DC, that have all these toys and are attracting significant urban investment that has resulted in increased economic activity and an increase in favorable socioeconomic demographics. All of these cities have also been set up by the same terrible ideas at the beginning of the century that led to violence and bad schools, which they have, and yet you'd be hard pressed to find someone (besides your armchair youtube commenter) who would label them failures as cities.
Ideally, the whole metro would pay into the advancement of the whole metro with the city center receiving a higher proportion because, ideally, that's where the center of activity is which benefits the whole metro. Instead, many places in America have become "I've got mine, |expletive| the rest of you" sorts of places. The solution to solving a problem isn't to neglect it.
Seriously, have you looked at Facebook? I realize that it is perhaps older than your demographic slice, but it is an interesting glimpse at how people from around Omaha signing their own names to statements have very negative opinions about this project. The pols would have been suicidal to push it outside of a coordinated system for city wide mass transit.
My demographic slice started Facebook. Internet comment boards are terrible gauges for public perception. I hadn't even referred to the street car. You know what? |expletive| the street car. Just some usable public transit would be great.
"Video game violence is not a new problem. Who could forget in the wake of SimCity how children everywhere took up urban planning." - Stephen Colbert