Cities, broadly, manage a number of public assets with which they provide public services. Some of those services are somewhat passive in the sense that no active labor aside from maintenance is being carried out. And others are more active in that the asset is being used by public sector employees or contractors to provide a public service. We generally think of the latter as the primary mode of public service delivery as it is more visible. We see the bus driver, the police officer, the firefighter, etc in our communities doing their jobs. But the passive service is no less important. We drive on roads, use water and sewer infrastructure (though this is a blended service), etc on a daily basis as we go about our lives. One of the big differences between these two kinds of services is how the public sector asks users to pay for them. Some services are supported through taxes, but a great many are supported through user fees. Below, I point out two approaches to this for getting around a central city: the cost of storing a vehicle on a public street versus the cost of using the transit system.

I’m horribly bad at project management. It’s not usually something that is specifically taught in graduate school even though it’s incredibly important to an academic’s professional life. There are many ways to go about this (low tech to super high tech), but the purpose of this post is to explain one tool that I have found incredibly useful and flexible. That tool is Notion (notion.so). Notion can do way more than I am going to explain (see Using Notion as Your Second Brain), but this is how I use it to keep track of writing projects throughout the process of development to publication.

Disclaimer: There’s a significant update to this post. See here.