The bar for publicity for any given study has been dropping for a while, but when COVID hit it gutterballed.

We're also talking about economists giving their hot epidemiological takes; I don't know of any other profession that we would tolerate like that. If physicists decided to discuss anthropology there would be howling.

It's not entirely fair to discuss "public transit" in the United States as homogeneous, either. BART is useful. I hear NY's subway system is, too. I've found Portland's MAX to be handy to get around while my experience in three or four American cities is that the minute you invoke a bus, you're fukt. Still, I can see it being an easy trend to point at. The line where the mentally-ill homeless soil themselves and people hop on and off to sell headphones is unlikely to have the same level of sanitation where white yuppies take their kids to the Santa Monica Pier on Saturdays. More than that, all the buses around here now say "ESSENTIAL TRAVEL ONLY" on them, as if the people riding the bus to work in the middle of a pandemic needed a reminder of their uber-shitty social status.

'cuz I tell you what if you were riding into downtown on the Express in order to save on parking, you've been working remotely since March. And all them brown people you used to mentally express solidarity with don't even remember you anymore.