There is a funny, sort-of-sad line in this CityLab piece about boosting participation in local elections by two of the higher ups at the National League of Cities: “…in what is supposedly one of the most democratic countries, we can’t get more than half of our population to vote regularly.”

Dallas would kill for those numbers. Today is Election Day, on which you all will have the chance to vote on a bevy of state constitutional amendments. Some will vote on a replacement for former state Rep. Eric Johnson in District 100, the House seat he vacated when he won mayor. There are some local races in Mesquite. But all signs point to this being a disastrous turnout, despite the fact that you can now vote at any county polling location—not just the ones in your district.

In the May election, perhaps the most important mayoral race in recent Dallas history, about 11 percent of registered voters went to the polls. Four years before that, 7.4 percent of registered voters reelected Mayor Mike Rawlings. That was good enough to be the worst turnout in the nation’s 50 largest cities. In the last non-mayoral election, when there was a multi-billion dollar bond package up for a vote as well as some constitutional amendments and the future of the Dallas County Schools busing system, just 6.5 percent of voters cared to express themselves on a ballot.

The CityLab article notes that “our voter registration process is complicated and punitive,” particularly so in Texas. The writers—Brooks Rainwater, a senior executive at the League, and Olivia Snarski, a local democracy program leader—highlight some creative ways to motivate voter turnout: train social services providers on voter registration assistance, give landlords incentives to hand over registration forms, embrace public schools as a convener for such efforts. (Some of those things are already happening here.) Same-day registration, which Rainwater and Snarski say jump turnout by 10 percent in states that offer it, probably won’t fly politically in Texas.

The story is interesting, but it places a lot of responsibility on the backs of mayors. And in Dallas, Mayor Eric Johnson simply isn’t able to enact policies like tax credits to small businesses that give their employees the day off to go vote. (We do have two full weeks of early voting, something not every other state offers.) The weak mayor system puts that power in the hands of the city manager and City Council. That’s not to say we can’t think creatively about this:

Ah, the lowly bus. Whenever I write about buses—and there is good reason to, given that Dallas is about to give its entire bus network a rehaul—someone in the comments sounds-off with some version of this critique: people don’t ride buses because buses suck.

It’s a difficult point to argue against. If you have ever ridden a bus, and especially if your experience of bus travel is limited to Dallas, then you know how bouncing around on a bus through this city’s streets can be an excruciating, sometimes nauseating experience. They’re often too hot or too cold; they can feel like a boat heaving on rough seas; their routes wind round and round; they take forever to reach their destination; there are so many stops it can sometimes feel that you could walk faster than a bus that has to scoop up passengers at every street corner and stop at every stoplight. I get it. Buses are often not fun.

I have ridden some nice buses. Chicago has a good bus system, and it ties into the “L” trains seamlessly. London’s buses are incredibly efficient and wonderful complement to the tube, once you get a handle on the routes. Rome’s buses are rough, but they are often all you have to rely on, so you make them work, which is easier in a city that is so dense. My aunt rode the same bus route from Queens, NY to Midtown nearly every day for decades, so much so that the bus became for her a kind of “third place,” and her stories of bickering and kvetching with her fellow bus regulars became a common topic of conversation at family gatherings. This is all to say that, despite their reputation, buses can work.

But why, then, do people harbor such deep–almost irrational–hatred for the bus?

Buried near the 40-minute mark of the surreptitious recording of House Speaker Dennis Bonnen and the far-right Empower Texans head Michael Q. Sullivan was a brief exchange that spelled out the antipathy many in the state Legislature feel toward Texas’ cities:

Dennis Bonnen: In this office, in the conference room at that end, any mayor or county judge who’s dumbass enough to come meet with me, I told them with great clarity, my goal is for this to be the worst session in the history of the legislature for cities and counties.

Dustin Burrows: I hope the next session is even worse.

Dennis Bonnen: And I’m all for that.

The quote made it around certain Twitter circles yesterday morning. The plain language explained what plenty of bills have done in recent legislative sessions: kneecap urban areas from passing policy the Lege doesn’t want. Last year came reform bills that capped the rate at which cities can raise property taxes. The Lege banned red light cameras. It blocked cities from charging private telecommunication companies for using public right of way, particularly concerning when you think of all the impending 5G infrastructure.

Houston estimates that not charging telecom companies for right of way will cost it $27 million per year. Taken altogether, the bills passed by the Lege will create a $44 million annual shortfall for the city of Dallas by 2023, according to a budget forecast. Even Moody’s found the property tax reform law would generate “minimal” homeowner savings but would “hurt local governments substantially.” That sounds like a plan to screw local governments more than provide relief to taxpayers.

Burrows, the Lubbock state representative who was also heard spouting off on the tape, later added, “We hate cities and counties.” He told Sullivan he had pitched the governor on taking away what cities can use from sales tax to pay for economic development, public transit, or other services.

These strategies aren’t new.

Dallas Area Rapid Transit proved it is finally serious about fixing its bus system. On Wednesday, the DART board voted to sign a contract with public transit consultant Jarrett Walker, who will help the public transit agency draw up a new plan for bus service in the region.

Walker is a big name in the world of transit planning—and bus system planning in particular. He and his firm have worked with cities all over the world, and he has proven successful helping low density cities rethink how to organize their public transit systems and improve bus reliability and ridership. Perhaps most notably, in Seattle, Walker helped what CityLab deemed a “transit-backward town” become a national model in implementing smart, efficient bus service. Walker was also deeply involved in Houston’s bus redo. He writes about his ideas about public transit at HumanTransit.org.

That DART is bringing Walker on board is significant not simply because he is a smart transit wonk. Walker is known for being able to lead civic leaders and transit officials through the complicated political calculations that can inhibit transit reform. Earlier this week, I wrote about Steven Higashide’s new book Better Buses, Better Transit, in which the author argues successful conversations around transit need “to include process and politics, not just technology and policy.” That phrase pretty much sums up Walker’s approach.

“If the buses are terrible in your city, you may think that buses are terrible in general,” Walker wrote in a 2018 Atlantic piece. “In truth, a city’s bus service is as good as its leaders and voters want it to be. Where voters have funded better bus services and cities have worked to give them priority, as in Seattle, ridership has soared.”

A couple of weeks ago, I was driving around Costa Rica, a country known for its challenged infrastructure, when I noticed one simple, if exceptional feature of the Central American country’s roads. Driving in Costa Rica meant battling plenty of dirt, rocky, and unpaved roads; massive potholes; roads that disappeared into swampy bogs; single lane bridges over rivers that occasionally had giant holes in them; towns only accessible via mazes of dirt paths that sometimes led into ditches or creeks; and other obstacles. But on every kind of road, every mile or so, there was a modest shelter demarcating a bus stop.

The bus shelters were often simple affairs—a few posts holding up a corrugated metal roof, a wooden bench or two. But because the bus shelters were there, within a few hours I knew that the region had an extensive bus network. If I missed one of those Swiss cheese bridges and drove my rental into a croc-infested river, I could always jump on a bus and head back to town. The bus shelters did what DART’s tiny yellow bus stop signs fail to do: provide an easy and immediate way to navigate the region’s public transit network. Nearly every time I saw one, I couldn’t help but throw up my hands and shout in exasperation, “Why can’t Dallas build simple, stupid bus shelters?”

On Friday, Tim wrote about the latest shenanigans coming from the North Central Texas Council of Governments and its transportation director Michael Morris, and the absurd plan to funnel millions of federal transportation dollars to prop up an idiotic, and wildly conflicted, idea of building soccer fields under I-345. The incident offers yet another example of how a governmental organization with little actual public oversight is able to advance large-scale public projects without much of a public process. “This isn’t really all transportation related,” Morris admits, almost flaunting the way he can deploy millions in public funds at his own personal discretion. So much for democracy.

This shouldn’t be surprising—this kind of thing happens all the time. How does it happen? Across the country, civil engineers have built up a solid strategy of thwarting public will by relying on a few rhetorical and procedural tricks of the trade. Over on Strong Towns, Charles Marohn breaks down the playbook. As a jumping off point, Marohn’s article uses a letter that traffic engineers in Springfield, Massachusetts, sent in response to three city council members’ request for a new signaled crosswalk near the New England town’s library. In the letter, Marohn, an engineer himself, finds all four of the typical obfuscations that thwart the public process. If you follow city politics, each of these four general strategies will sound all too familiar. Here are some highlights.