Someone who actually lives *in* San Antonio, do me a favor.

Go to one of the many fora featuring the mayoral candidates & if they ever shut up about the 281/1604 interchange, stand up and ask them what they intend to do for the REST of the city. And the people who live there.

I'm so sick of hearing about the poor folks who live on the far northwest side & how much time they spent in traffic. Dude, common sense. If you're looking for a house and you spend 45 minutes in traffic during the off-hours trying to get to the subdivision and you look around you and there are an ass ton of houses for sale in that subdivision and an ass ton of billboards for other subdivisions, and the news is filled with talk of explosive development in that part of town, then maybe it should occur to you that traffic's going to be heavy during rush hour. Really heavy. Oh, and for the record, they were promising to fix that shit when I was a kid. It ain't been done yet, it's not gonna be done any time soon.

Meanwhile, though I don't actually live in the city (I am literally across the street from the city limits) I go to school there and play there and go to church there and basically do everything but sleep there, so SA politics affect me personally, but I don't actually have any say in them. (I live in the county, so there's pretty much no local government here.)

I bounce from pothole to pothole on the way to take my daughter and then myself to school, and through a slightly different set on the way back. It's dangerous to so much as cross the street to go to Bobbie's school, because no one enforces the school zones anymore. My old high school still has a portion of the track fenced off because of contaminated soil (the hill is gone, but there's evidently more work to be done).

Fort Sam Houston and Camp Bullis are both being endangered by unchecked development. (Follow this: if Camp Bullis goes, Ft Sam follows. There are other places medics can be trained.) The graffiti problem is getting worse. We've got plenty of jobs, but they're all low-paying. The Central Library is crumbling--quite literally. The library budget is an embarrassment to a city of this size. Our rates of teenage pregnancy and child abuse remain far above the national average.

If I may be so bold, we've got far more pressing issues, as a municipality, than expanding the Riverwalk and helping a select group of people who chose to live very far away from their jobs, and in a very overdeveloped area, get home a little faster.