1. Fizz hears that SHARE, the homeless advocacy group that runs Tent City, is planning another "direct action" to demand more free bus tickets from King  County Metro. SHARE's protests have become a more-or-less annual ritual: The group runs out of bus tickets, they stage a protest (previous actions have included sleeping out in front of city council members' houses and riding buses without paying fare), and the city gives them money to buy more. The group has reportedly lost a number of tickets to theft in recent months. We have calls out to Metro and SHARE for more details on the bus ticket situation.

2. In other bus-related news, the Transit Riders Union---a group that formed largely in response to Metro's plans to eliminate the downtown Ride-Free Area---plans to hold a "funeral march" down Third Ave. at 3:00 pm on September 28 to deliver a petition to the King County Council asking them to keep the ride-free zone

alive. The ride-free area ends on September 29; after that, riders will have to pay when they get on the bus. Metro plans to provide some sort of free shuttle between downtown and First Hill for people who can't afford to pay the $2.25 fare.

3.  City council transportation committee chair Tom Rasmussen has signed on to Mayor Mike McGinn's proposal to spend $5 million studying "high-capacity transit" expansion along three corridors---downtown to the U District along Eastlake, Madison from downtown up First Hill, and across the Ship Canal.

Rasmussen's buy-in is significant. The council has long been skeptical of McGinn's infatuation with light rail---they put the brakes on his campaign promise to put a Ballard-to-West-Seattle light rail measure on the ballot by 2010, and held back funding for his Transit Master Plan because they considered too light-rail-centric.

However, read between the lines on Rasmussen's statement supporting McGinn's $5 million study. Although McGinn has described the money as "$5 million for rail expansion in Seattle," Rasmussen refers to it as funding for "more reliable transit choices, such as rail and other types of electric powered transit vehicles." That could be light rail, but it could also be streetcars---or bus-rapid transit. McGinn needs Rasmussen's support to get his $5 million, but he shouldn't read that support as a full-throated endorsement of light rail over other types of transit.

4. Alex Kotlowitz has a must-read take on the Chicago teachers' strike in last Friday's NYT, where he asks the question: Are we asking too much of our teachers? "We’ve imagined teachers as lazy, excuse-making quasi-professionals — or, alternately, as lifesavers," he writes. "But the truth, of course, is more complicated."