Much of the public discussion over A Better Billion, our proposal to increase New York’s subway construction spending by $1 billion a year in lieu of Zohran Mamdani’s free bus plan, has taken it for granted that free buses are good, and it’s just a matter of arguing over spending priorities. Charlie Komanoff, who I deeply respect, proposes to combine subway construction with making the buses free. And yet, free buses remain a bad idea, regardless of funding, because of the effects of breaking fare integration between buses and the subway. If there is money for making the buses free, and it must go to fare reductions rather than to better service, then it should go to a broad reduction in fares, especially if it can also reduce the monthly rate in order to align with best practices.
Planning with fare integration
The current situation in New York is that buses and the subway have nearly perfect fare integration: the fares are the same, the fare-capped passes apply to both modes equally, and one free transfer (bus-bus or bus-subway) is allowed before the passenger hits the cap. Regular riders who would be taking multi-transfer trips are likely to be hitting the cap anyway so that restriction, while annoying, doesn’t change how passengers travel.
Under this regime of fare integration, buses and the subway are planned together. The bus network is not planned to connect every pair of points in the city, because the subway does that at 2.5 times the average speed. Instead, it’s designed to connect subway deserts to the subway, offer crosstown service where the subway only points radially toward the Manhattan core, and run service on streets with such high demand that buses get high ridership even with a nearby subway. The same kinds of riders use both modes.
The bus network has accumulated a lot of cruft in it over the generations and the redesigns are half-measures, but there’s very little duplication of service, if we define duplication as a bus that is adjacent to the subway and has middling or weak ridership. For example, the B25 runs on Fulton on top of the A/C, and the B37 and B63 run respectively on Third and Fifth Avenues a block away from the R, and all have middling traffic. In contrast, the Bx1/2 runs on Grand Concourse on top of the B/D but is one of the highest-ridership buses in the system. B25-type situations are rare, and most of the bus service that needs to be cut as part of system modernization is of a different form, for example routes in Williamsburg that function as circulators with maybe half the borough’s average ridership per service hour.
In this schema, the replacement of a bus with a train is an unalloyed good. The train is faster, more reliable, more comfortable. Owing to those factors, the train can also support higher ridership and thus frequency. If the train stops every 800 meters and averages 30 km/h and the bus stops every 400 and averages 15 (the current New York average is much lower; 15 is what is possible with stop consolidation from 200 to 400 meter interstations and other treatments), then it takes a 2.5 km trip for the replacement to be worth it on trip time even for a passenger living right on top of the deleted bus stop, and a 5 km one if we take into account the walk penalty – and that’s before we include all the bonuses for rail travel over bus travel, which fall under the rubric of rail bias.
The consequences of differentiated fares
All of the above planning goes out the window if there are large enough differences in fares that passengers of different classes or travel patterns take different modes. Commuter rail, not part of this system of fare integration in New York or anywhere else in the United States, is not planned in coordination with the subway or the buses, and fundamentally can’t be until the fares are fixed. Indeed, busy buses run in parallel to faster but more expensive and less frequent commuter lines in New York and other American cities, and when the buses happen to feed the stations, as at Jamaica Station on the LIRR or some Metro-North stations or at some Fairmount Line stations in Boston, interchange volumes are limited.
Commuter rail has many problems in addition to fares. But when the subway charges noticeably higher fares than the bus to the point that passengers sort by class, the same planning problems emerge. In Washington, the cheap, flat-fare bus and more expensive, distance-based fare on Metro led to two classes of users on two distinct classes of transit. When Metro finally extended to Anacostia with the opening of the Green Line in 1991, an attempt to redesign the buses to feed the station rather than competing with Metro by going all the way into Downtown Washington led to civil rights protests and lawsuits alleging that it was racist to force low-income black riders onto the more expensive product.
Whenever fares are heavily differentiated, any shift toward the higher-fare service involves such a fight. One of the factors behind the reluctance of the New York public transit advocacy sphere to come out in favor of commuter rail improvements is that those are white middle class-coded because that’s the profile of the LIRR and Metro-North ridership, caused by a combination of high fares and poor urban service. Fare integration is a fight as well, but it’s one fight per city region rather than one fight per rail project.
And more to the point, New York doesn’t even need to have that one fight at least as far as subway-bus integration is concerned, because the subways and buses are already fare integrated. What’s more, free bus supporters like Mamdani and Komanoff aren’t proposing this out of belief that fares should be disintegrated, but out of belief that it’s a stalking horse for free transit, a policy that Komanoff has backed for decades (he proposed to pair it with congestion pricing in the Bloomberg era) and that the Democratic Socialists of America have been in favor of. The latter is loosely inspired by 1960s movements and by reading many tourist-level descriptions in the American press of European cities with too weak a transit system for revenue to matter very much. Free buses in this schema are on the road to fully free transit, but then the argument for them involves the very small share of transit revenue contributed by buses rather than the subway. In effect, an attempt to make the system free led to a proposal that could only ever result in disintegrated fares, even though that is not the intent.
But good intent does not make for a good program. That free buses are not proposed with the intent of breaking fare integration is irrelevant; if the program is implemented, it will break fare integration, and turn every bus redesign into a new political fight and even create demand for buses that have no reason to exist except to parallel subway lines. The program should be rejected, not just because it costs money that can be better spent on other things, but because it is in itself bad.
North American leaders are finding it difficult to cajole oil executives into making risky long-term investments.
No, we’re not referring to President Trump’s efforts to convince American energy giants to invest in Venezuela’s long neglected oil industry.
We’re referring to recent statements by the head of Canadian energy major Enbridge about its unwillingness to invest in a pipeline to move Alberta’s oil to Canada’s west coast.
“I don’t think investors or the infrastructure companies should be taking on the risk of development in jurisdictions that have historically created a challenge,” Enbridge CEO Gregory Ebel said in a mid-February earnings call.
Ebel reminded listeners that Enbridge poured $600 million into the Northern Gateway pipeline, only to have the government’s approval invalidated due to Ottawa’s failure to consult First Nations. From Ebel’s perspective, “the rug was pulled out from underneath.”
“So that’s not the type of risk that we’re looking to take on at this time. We don’t need to with all the other opportunities,” Ebel added.
Premier Danielle Smith must be sorely disappointed to hear this.
Enbridge is one of just three companies chosen by the Alberta government to provide technical advice on a proposal for a new oil pipeline to the B.C. coast.
That proposal is due by July 1, according to the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that Alberta and Ottawa signed in November.
The MOU commits Alberta to advancing the development of a pipeline by the private sector. And it commits Ottawa to declaring that pipeline a priority and referring it to its newly formed Major Projects Office.
In the call, Ebel said the MOU was “very encouraging,” but not enough to encourage his battle-scarred company to invest.
“Obviously, there’s been lots of signs and signals. I think what we’re looking for is actually concrete actions,” he said.
Ebel’s statements may also come as a surprise — and disappointment — to Ottawa, which launched the Major Projects Office in one of the Carney government’s first acts. The office exists to get “nation-building” projects built faster by accelerating regulatory processes and helping coordinate financing.
For our part, we are disappointed but unfortunately not surprised to see that the MOU and Major Projects Office have not been enough to make a homegrown global pipeline leader invest in its home country.
In October, we wrote that the Major Projects Office is, at best, a short-term solution. What Canada really needs is broad, structural reforms to improve the business environment for all — not just a few hand-selected projects Ottawa favours.
For those in doubt over whether such broader reforms are needed, consider this: in the World Bank Group’s recently released 2025 Business Ready report, Canada ranked 33rd for regulatory framework, behind such notable economies as Armenia, Costa Rica, Rwanda and Azerbaijan.
According to the report, a country’s regulatory framework is considered one of three foundational pillars affecting a country’s business and investment climate. (Canada ranked, by contrast, 8th, in both of the other two key pillars: public services and operational efficiency.)
Unfortunately, we have seen no signals from Ottawa so far that it is contemplating such broader reforms.
Short of such efforts, desperate policymakers may find themselves catering to the specific demands of specific companies.
In the earnings call, Ebel spelled out, for example, what types of concrete actions Enbridge is looking for.
In addition to a need for a commitment of stable policy, he mentioned possible government backstopping of a project until it is built.
We would be strongly opposed to such a measure. Maintaining an unclear and haphazard regulatory framework and then providing financial backstops when projects fail would be an egregious dereliction of duty on the part of politicians.
Instead, the government should be clear about the project parameters and approvals, and should fulfill its obligations, such as First Nations consultations. Once granted, its approvals should not be withdrawn.
Ebel also noted that the outcome of Alberta and Ottawa’s negotiations over an industrial carbon charge would be critical.
“That’s going to be super important for our customers, producers to get a feel for whether or not Canada is competitive enough for them to continue to see the kind of growth that we’ve been seeing,” he said.
Now, you may hope Ottawa scraps the industrial carbon charge, or not. But we don’t want corporations swaying these types of policy decisions, simply because Ottawa is desperate to achieve its goal of diversifying trade.
Quick fixes will only work for so long. At some point, Canada is going to need to do the difficult work of structural reforms. The question is: for a self-professed generational leader, is Prime Minister Carney up for the challenge?
More than two decades ago, a small group of women with advanced breast cancer took part in a clinical trial that tested an experimental vaccine. All these years later, every one of them is still alive. Researchers say survival over such a long period is extremely uncommon for people with metastatic breast cancer, which is why the case drew renewed scientific attention.
Researchers at Duke Health took a closer look at the immune systems of the women who participated in the trial, which was led by Herbert Kim Lyerly, M.D., George Barth Geller Distinguished Professor of Immunology at Duke University School of Medicine. What they discovered surprised them. Even after many years, the women still had powerful immune cells that could recognize their cancer.
These immune cells shared a specific marker known as CD27. This marker plays an important role in helping the immune system remember past threats and respond to them again. The results, published in Science Immunology, point to CD27 as a possible way to make cancer vaccines far more effective.
"We were stunned to see such durable immune responses so many years later," said Zachary Hartman, Ph.D., senior author of the study and associate professor in the Departments of Surgery, Integrative Immunology and Pathologyat Duke University School of Medicine. "It made us ask: What if we could boost this response even more?"
Testing the CD27 Approach in the Lab
To explore that question, the research team ran experiments using mice. They combined a vaccine aimed at HER2 (a protein on the surface of some cells, including breast cancer) with an antibody designed to activate CD27. The results were striking. Nearly 40% of mice that received the combined treatment saw their tumors disappear completely. By comparison, only 6% of mice treated with the vaccine alone experienced the same outcome.
Further analysis showed that the CD27 antibody worked by greatly enhancing the activity of CD4+ T cells, a type of immune cell.
A Bigger Role for Overlooked Immune Cells
According to Hartman, CD4+ T cells, often called "helper" cells, do not usually get much attention in cancer research. Most studies focus instead on CD8+ "killer" T cells, which are known for directly attacking tumors. This study suggests the helper cells may be just as important. They appear to drive lasting immune memory and support other immune cells so they can work more effectively.
When researchers added another antibody that further supports CD8+ T cells, tumor rejection rates in mice climbed to nearly 90%.
"This study really shifts our thinking," Hartman said. "It shows that CD4+ T cells aren't just supporting actors; they can be powerful cancer fighters in their own right and are possibly essential for truly effective anti-tumor responses."
Implications for Future Cancer Treatments
The team also discovered that the CD27 antibody only needed to be given once, at the same time as the vaccine, to produce long lasting effects. This simplicity could make it easier to pair the approach with existing cancer treatments, including immune checkpoint inhibitors and antibody-drug conjugates already used in patients.
Hartman believes these findings may help cancer vaccines finally reach their full promise.
"We've known for a long time that vaccines can work against cancer, but they haven't lived up to the hype," he said. "This could be a missing piece of the puzzle."
The study received funding from the National Institutes of Health (117 R01CA238217-01A1/02S1) and the Department of Defense (W81XWH-20-1-034618 and W81XWH-21-2-0031).
For those who don’t contain a vast knowledge of Green Day lore like myself, I don’t think it is hitting just how much of a “fuck you” the NFL is giving djt/the white house.
This is a band that is:
Made entirely of openly bisexual/queer men
Made entirely of men who are vocal about being raised by single mothers on welfare
One of their members was adopted and raised by a Black woman and has said he “understands how his mother could hate ‘the white man’ and love him with her whole soul.”
Were the first band to say, “No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist/MAGA U.S.A.” on live television without ANY warning.
Literally released a song last year called, “The American Dream Is Killing Me”
Only hires ALL FEMALE bands to open for them to address inequality in the music industry
OPENLY tells trump supporters they are not welcome at their concerts.
Anyway, Enjoy Feb. 8th Magats! You’re gonna hate it. :)
Fuentes: “So just like Hitler imprisoned Gypsies, Jews, communists, you know, all of his political rivals, we have to do the same thing with women. … So they go to the gulag first. They go to the breeding gulags.”
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