Today’s Headlines

• Tyrants Tremble at Uprisings in Middle East — And So Do the Oil Markets (NYT)
• MTA Unveils Text-Based Real-Time Info for Metro-North (NY1)
• Tom Vanderbilt Rides Along on America’s Most Unusual Bike Commute (Outside)
• If Congestion Pricing Had Passed, Could the MTA Have Cleared Tracks Faster Post-Blizzard? (News)
• Bronx Man Gets Four Years for Fatal DWI Crash Upstate (AP)
• Hey Chris Christie, CT Gov Dannel Malloy Proposed a Higher Gas Tax and He Didn’t Vaporize (MTR)
• The Villager Covers NYMTC Recommendations to Widen Canal Street Sidewalks
• In Spirit of Constructive Engagement, Cap’n Transit Critiques Adam Lisberg
• Which Borough Is Home to NYC’s Most Obnoxious Car Owners? (FiPS)
• Marcia Kramer’s Wikipedia Entry Has Some Recent Changes (Brooklyn Spoke)

More headlines at Streetsblog Capitol Hill.

We’ll be offline the rest of today and back publishing regularly tomorrow. In the meantime, via Matt Yglesias, I think you’ll enjoy mulling over this excerpt from a speech RFK gave during the 1968 presidential campaign:

Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product – if we judge the United States of America by that – that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.