in the news.

This entry will be a little different than my typical long-winded account of something mundane in my life. We get the Raleigh News & Observer at my office, and I've taken to perusing it. I've never been a news person, really. If something big happens, I navigate over to CNN.com. For a while in Winston-Salem, I listened to NPR, and I found myself walking around with a weird sense of elitism and a quiet outrage all the time. But now I'm back to my blissful ignorance. Usually I just read the funnies or try to figure out the anagrams in the Raleigh paper in the breakroom, but on the occasions when someone is using the Life section but I don't want to go back to my desk, I find out a little bit about the world. For instance, did you know that Liz Claiborne died? Did you know she was still alive?

I read a front page article the other day about the public transportation system here in Raleigh. I've never ridden the bus system here, though I've used public transportation enough to know what to expect from the experience. Josh uses the buses to get to work sometimes. He says it's not a bad system, reasonably on time and regular, mostly clean. However, four shopping centers in the area have banned the city buses from their parking lots.

I haven't been here long enough to know much about the individual centers, but I am familiar with one of them. It's ginormous and very shiny, meaning that while the stores are about the same as any other shopping center, the construction is much nicer and modern. Around it are clean and achingly cookie-cutter suburban townhomes that don't even bother to try and pretend that you're living in a real house with a real lawn. Instead, they just say, "Live here! You only have to drive your SUV a tenth of a mile to shop!"

The article quotes a representative of this particular shopping center, who says that the reason for the ban is because of congested parking lots. So, the solution to congested parking is...wait for it...banning public transportation.

To me, this sounds like complete BS. It seems to me that the centers are just trying to keep out people who can't afford to spend a lot of money. What's the point of letting the poor people in if they're just going to drive the property values down without increasing revenue? In fact, the bus people don't shop there. The only reason this issue has even come up is because people are having to walk a quarter mile from the bus stop to their jobs. Bus people work there, and so really, no matter how long they have to walk, they will do it, because it is their livelihoods. If banning the buses actually caused any drop in sales, I bet they'd find a way to allow them even in those congested parking lots.

You know what? Those parkings lots are annoyingly full and busy. I've noticed that myself. Getting rid of the buses will not help that. Designing a better parking lot that allows for public transportation will.

The ban is being taken to court, and I'm hoping that the buses will win. Someone more cynical than I would insist that they've already lost. I have my own solution. Ban SUVs!

Yeah, right.