In his latest blog post, it is clear that Mayor Pave either:

a) Done got borned agin (Hallelujah! Amen, brothers & sisters!)

or,

b) Is feeling the heat and the dimming prospects for re-election

or

c) A lot of both.

Robbie Webber does a good job of deconstructing his new awareness of the economic efficacy of transit v. deathmobile over at Brenda Konkel’s blog.

Critical though it was, I thought she was very kind to him. In calculating the High Costs of Driving, he leaves out the costs in lives & limbs. He leaves out the costs to our quality of life. And he leaves out the costs to our spirit as we allow our machines to dictate hate & brutality as part & parcel of our way of getting around.

But on a sheer dollars & cents basis, the mayor’s analysis is a good one. It is just too bad that he is only now getting to it. We worked our asses off for him in 2003 for exactly this sort of thinking. He jettisoned the smart growth, pro-transit, pro-pedestrian, pro-bike ideas soon after taking office, calculating it politically expedient. (He is, after all, a political calculator extraordinaire; and I mean calculator in the most basic, mechanistic sense.) I think he is beginning to realize that he burned the very votes, the very neighborhoods who put him in office and who have been steadily turning against him. It is always dangerous to turn your back on ideals when politically active in a city that thrives on ideals.

The field is wide open for a new mayor in 2011.