Paris: More like Los Angeles than New York

Human Transit has a nice post here with one of the author's "favorite urban heresies":

Paris is more like Los Angeles than it is like New York.

He goes on to explain that the New York metro area has its jobs extremely concentrated in the center, whereas L.A. and Paris have their job centers in multiple clusters.


He then goes on to note that the mass transit system in L.A. built over the last two decades (pictured above) has been very oriented toward Downtown. I've noticed that the system is like spokes without a wheel for a while now. With as much progress as there's been in the transit system, it's still in its infancy. I think starting soon, though, Metro is going to need to start thinking seriously about turning the system into a real network instead of just a bunch of lines going to Downtown.

Here's the Long-Range Transportation Plan and here is more detail on various ongoing projects. There needs to be a way to go north from LAX to the Westside... I guess we can blame Zev Yaroslavsky and Henry Waxman for the Westside being about 20 years behind where it should be.

Washington Nationals Fandom?

So, I've noticed, from time to time, young people wearing the ballcap depicted on the right, which is for the Washington Nationals. Young people wear ballcaps all the time, of course, and obviously not everybody is a fan of the local teams. But there seem to be more people wearing this than one would ordinarily think. First of all, I live more than 2,500 miles away from Washington. Second, the Nationals are an awful team --- they've never finished higher than 4th place, and they currently have the worst record in baseball. They're also new (they moved to Washington in 2005), and I don't know of any legion of fans like the Cubs or Yankees have.

And yet I seem to see people wearing their cap more often than many better or more well-established teams in baseball. How did this become fashionable? Is there some rapper that wears their gear? Is this some sort of in-joke where the "W" stands for something else? Or are the Nationals just a lot more popular than I thought? What's up with that?