Public art: would it make you ride Metro more?

These presentations show new public art that the Metro Customer Service Committee and Board are expected to consider on Thursday.  The public art will be installed at five Metrorail stations in Tyson's Corner and Reston, and at the entrance to the Farragut North station.

According to the presentation, art at the Tyson's stations will cost $1.7M and will be funded by Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority. 

Metro states that public art, "helps create attractive transit facilities that increase ridership and enrich the lives" of its passengers.  It also states that the art selected will "reflect the artistic, cultural and historic interests" of the surrounding communities.

More importantly, the presentation about Tyson's Corner stations is the best view I've seen of the location and design of the four stations.  The feature they all have in common is that access will be from pedestrian bridges.  If the stations had been placed underground, access would have likely been through entrances and tunnels on either side of the street.  Here's a Google map showing the locations of the stations:

View Tysons Corner Metro Expansion in a larger map

So what do you think of the art in the presentation?  Does it reflect the local Tyson's Corner community?  If not, what would the appropriate art look like?  Are there other public art installations in Metro that you like or dislike?  Would it be likely to increase ridership or enrich your life?

How many Metro stations can you name that have public art?

Here's the proposed artwork.

Tyson's East

Tyson's Central 123

 

Tyson's Central 7

Tyson's West

Wiehle Ave

Farragut North

That's a big deficit.

Mankiw has a post up depicting what happened to our deficit this year.  Short story is we're paying out about 27% of GDP and only collecting about 16% of GDP in taxes.  While that's not as high as it was in WWII, it's as high as it has ever been since then.  Holy Crap.

Also, it is not projected to get much better.  Long term, we're talking spending 22-25% of GDP and taxing only about 19%.

Does TurboTax make the tax code more complicated?

So argued Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center last week.  He states that because we have software and paid preparers, complicated tax provisions like the AMT are more likely to continue without complaint, rather than be removed from the tax code at the demand of angry taxpayers.

I know in my case, I just plugged my data into TurboTax and accepted its conclusion that I don't owe the AMT.  He's probably right.  I'm not that upset there's an AMT, but then again I spent about 20 seconds thinking about it out of about 10 hours total preparing taxes. 

In other news, I'm not posting much on Infosnack lately as you can tell.  Most of my blogging is going up over at Greater Greater Washington, including approximately weekly live chats with local politicians, officials, authors, and others involved in transit, smart growth and other local issues.  If the volume of posts at GGW (about 3-4 daily) would overwhelm your reader, periodically check this link, which is for my posts only. 

Infosnack is not dead.  I will continue to post here when I get the chance.  Most of my writing will be going up on Greater Greater, and often Infosnack will get the "rough draft" version of the same post.  I appreciate if you prefer to read only Infosnack and I'll still be reading any comments you put here.