The Fall of Philadelphia - "Cutting almost half of a transit system is not a way to make it more efficient. It more like asking whether you’d like to keep your heart or your lungs."

This raises one of the most insidious aspects of how many US states have constructed the powers of local governments. Conservative state leaders appear to be nearly unanimous in their view that big cities should be prevented from governing themselves. In particular, they are committed to denying local governments the freedom to ask their own voters to raise their own taxes to pay for things that they value.

The idea is to make city governments helpless while continuing to blame them for everything that goes wrong in cities. It plays well in conservative media, but it’s not fair and it’s certainly not democracy. When dense cities are not allowed to fund their services in a way that reflects their needs and values, it guarantees that the city will be a site of failure — failure that will be especially visible to the media because in dense cities everything is more visible.

well said :(