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2024 Reading Goal

58% complete! CowsLookLikeMaps has read 7 of 12 books.

Margaret Killjoy: We Won't Be Here Tomorrow (2022, AK Press Distribution) 5 stars

Margaret Killjoy’s stories have appeared for years in science fiction and fantasy magazines both major …

Honestly, with her skills and drive and education and upbringing—but minus her criminal record, perhaps—she could have been the mark we were about to rob. She could have had his job and his life and his underlings and his investments. But as she told me once, stealing felt a lot more honest when it was illegal.

We Won't Be Here Tomorrow by  (Page 158)

Megan Kimble: City Limits (2024, Crown Publishing Group, The) 5 stars

Jay scoffed - a highway was Culberson's pride and joy? And then he wondered: Were cars moving faster than they had been before the highway was expanded? He looked at Houston's travel time data, comparing how long it took to drive on I-10 during rush hour from downtown Houston to the far-flung suburb of Katy. In 2005, the thirty-mile trip took fifty-two minutes at rush hour. In 2014- only six years after the state had spent $2.8 billion to widen the highway- during rush hour that same trip took seventy minutes, an increase of 33 percent. The highway was wider, but traffic was worse. In May 2015, Jay summarized his findings in a four-hundred-word article that he posted on the website for Houston Tomorrow. The story spread across the state, and then the country, and then the world Soon, the Katy Freeway expansion had become the most famous example of the phenomenon known as induced demand: If you make it easier for people to drive, more people will drive

City Limits by  (Page 142)

Megan Kimble: City Limits (2024, Crown Publishing Group, The) 5 stars

In 1944, a government report recommended that state and local authorities purchase needed lands for highways that would "aid in the efficient assembly and appropriate redevelopment of large tracts of blighted urban lands." As the Interstate Highway Act was being written, the American Association of State Highway Officials sent lobbyists to D.C. to influence the legislation. Alfred Johnson, the group's executive director, later recalled that "some city officials ex- pressed the view in the mid-1950s that the urban Interstates would give them a good opportunity to get rid of the local n----rtown. "

City Limits by  (Page 42)

Megan Kimble: City Limits (2024, Crown Publishing Group, The) 5 stars

All told, 1,220 structures were wiped from the Fifth Ward, including eleven churches, five schools, and two hospitals.

The idea to use interstate highways to remove "slums" and "blight" originated in the 1939 report Toll Roads and Free Roads, published by the highway engineer Thomas H. MacDonald. In it, MacDonald suggested that urban highways could serve a dual purpose: move cars and clear slums. "Citizens with adequate income"-white citizens- were leaving their homes in the center of the city in favor of the suburbs, he wrote. "The motor vehicle itself is the primary cause of this phenomenon."

City Limits by  (Page 40 - 41)

Megan Kimble: City Limits (2024, Crown Publishing Group, The) 5 stars

Downs's Law of Peak-Hour Traffic Congestion stated, "On urban commuter expressways, peak-hour traffic congestion rises to meet maximum capacity." Just as demand for goods fluctuated, demand for travel was not static. When presented with a wide-open expressway, commuters would flock to that expressway, eschewing other forms of travel. Offered this new ease of access, they might decide to move farther from their job or school, extending their commute, or take trips that might previously have been too costly, in time or money. Demand increases, outstripping the newly created supply. "We thus arrive at the paradoxical conclusion that the opening of an expressway could conceivably cause traffic congestion to become worse instead of better, and automobile commuting times to rise instead of fall!"

Researcher after researcher would replicate these findings: More lanes meant more traffic. Between 1993 and 2017, the hundred largest urbanized areas in the United States spent more than $500 billion adding new freeways or expanding existing ones. In those same cities, congestion increased by 144 percent, significantly outpacing population growth.

City Limits by  (Page 16)

Emma Goldman: Anarchism and other essays (Paperback, 1969, Dover) 5 stars

"Anarchism asserts the possibility of an organization without discipline, fear, or punishment, and without the …

"Indeed, conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism. Let me illustrate. Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others."

Anarchism and other essays by  (Page 128 - 129)

Emma Goldman: Anarchism and other essays (Paperback, 1969, Dover) 5 stars

"Anarchism asserts the possibility of an organization without discipline, fear, or punishment, and without the …

"Indeed, conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism. Let me illustrate. Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others."

Anarchism and other essays by  (Page 128 - 129)

Emma Goldman: Anarchism and other essays (Paperback, 1969, Dover) 5 stars

"Anarchism asserts the possibility of an organization without discipline, fear, or punishment, and without the …

"Yet when the crimes of that party became so brazen that even the blind could see them, it needed but to muster up its minions, and its supremacy was assured. Thus the very victims, duped, betrayed, out- raged a hundred times, decided, not against, but in favor of the victor."

Anarchism and other essays by  (Page 70)

Emma Goldman's essays are full of statements that are eerily relevant today. The struggles that people face in the 21st century are not fundamentally different to those of the 19th century.