Indeed, lest our baseball team become the butt of a gambling joke in the Back to the Future franchise. (;<p>That said, absolutely this. However, I&#x27;ll add one more thing: The projects that we see getting built seem like they&#x27;re more tourist-oriented than geared toward improving the standard of living for the city&#x27;s denizens.<p>Ultimately, I think the policy thing, especially surrounding the damnable tourist-oriented Loop Trolley, is going to be one of those &quot;lots of dollars squandered while we try to re-learn how to make our city a sustainable (and safe) place to live, work, and play and not just visit&quot; ordeals. That&#x27;s really quite unfortunate, but the reasons are cultural: We Americans just don&#x27;t like being told that we&#x27;re wrong or that something is a bad idea.<p>&quot;Oh yeah? Well, I&#x27;ll show you.&quot; And then ridership doesn&#x27;t meet projections, and those politicians wind up losing the Mandate of Heaven^W^W^Wnext election, and then we get the same thing all over again.<p>It&#x27;s funny. Not too far off is Madison county, and as far as a semi-rural county goes, I think they actually got the whole infrastructure development thing (more) right (than most urban Midwestern areas). Trails to rails, gradual &quot;nicening&quot; of facilities (i.e., implicit bus stops at intersections to explicit signage to full-out bus shelters), lots of green space between communities, more encouragement to build tighter towns and cities that don&#x27;t sprawl all over the place, etc.<p>I found using MCT for the six years that I lived up that way to be on par with, normalized for density, biking Berlin and riding the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe&#x27;s buses and trains when I last visited there. That&#x27;s pretty hard to pull off, and it was readily apparent that those were facilities meant to be used by the folks who lived there, not as a vehicle for tourism.