👓 See Just How Much Of A City’s Land Is Used For Parking Spaces

Read See Just How Much Of A City’s Land Is Used For Parking Spaces by Adele Peters (Fast Company)
In Los Angeles, for example, car parking takes up 17,020,594 square meters of land.
A great piece on urban and city planning which focuses on parking. I can only imagine how drastically different Los Angeles could look in just 20 years.

The website featured has some great visualizations and interactive features.

I guessed almost perfectly how much space Los Angeles delegates to cars, trains, and bicycles

🔖 American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper by Jacob S. Hacker & Paul Pierson

Bookmarked American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper (Simon & Schuster, March 29, 2016)
From the groundbreaking author team behind the bestselling Winner-Take-All Politics, a timely and topical work that examines what’s good for American business and what’s good for Americans—and why those interests are misaligned.<br><br> In Winner-Take-All Politics, Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson explained how political elites have enabled and propelled plutocracy. Now in American Amnesia, they trace the economic and political history of the United States over the last century and show how a viable mixed economy has long been the dominant engine of America’s prosperity.<br><br> Like every other prospering democracy, the United States developed a mixed economy that channeled the spirit of capitalism into strong growth and healthy social development. In this bargain, government and business were as much partners as rivals. Public investments in education, science, transportation, and technology laid the foundation for broadly based prosperity. Programs of economic security and progressive taxation provided a floor of protection and business focused on the pursuit of profit—and government addressed needs business could not.<br><br> The mixed economy was the most important social innovation of the twentieth century. It spread a previously unimaginable level of broad prosperity. It enabled steep increases in education, health, longevity, and economic security. And yet, extraordinarily, it is anathema to many current economic and political elites. And as the advocates of anti-government free market fundamentalist have gained power, they are hell-bent on scrapping the instrument of nearly a century of unprecedented economic and social progress. In American Amnesia, Hacker and Pierson explain how—and why they must be stopped.
Earlier tonight I watched a segment on The PBS NewsHour about infrastructure in America that featured this book which came out earlier this year.

📺 Watched PBS NewsHour full episode Dec. 1, 2016

Watched PBS NewsHour full episode Dec. 1, 2016 from PBS NewsHour
Thursday on the NewsHour, President-elect Trump travels to Indiana in celebration of a jobs deal with Carrier. Also, recovery efforts mount as the Tennessee wildfires wane, the future of American manufacturing jobs, volunteer medics struggle to save lives in Mosul, advances in the battle against AIDS, how failing infrastructure is limiting U.S. productivity, a new book on Iran and the war on weed.
The segment on crumbling infrastructure was very interesting and I’ll have to get a copy of American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson (Simon & Schuster, March 29, 2016)

The short snippet on the history of cannabis was also relatively interesting, particularly the discussion of how it’s perception was changed by the government.