Somerville in The Guardian (UK newspaper)

[ron_newman]

More major media coverage of our little city, from one of the UK's big daily newspapers:

Somerville: the city where policies are based on how happy they make people

I don't think this is accurate:

Another key example is the reinstatement of many of the traditional festivals, such as the "What the Fluff?", which celebrates the city's claim to fame of being home to the inventor of marshmallow fluff. This and other festivals had been popular when the mayor was growing up in Somerville but had been axed over the years because of budget cuts.

To my knowledge, What the Fluff? happened for the first time in 2006 and has repeated each year since then.

Comments

[ceelove.livejournal.com]

Somerville: the city where policies are based on how happy they make people...

...except for that bit where we clamored mightily against the parking restrictions and ridiculously inflated tickets, and got them anyway...

[tsuki-no-bara.livejournal.com]

that headline is pretty ironic considering the clusterfuck that is the cycletrack and decreased parking planned for beacon street....

[courtney o'keefe (from livejournal.com)]

It would have been great to see people's happiness level before and after the parking changes were implemented.

As a point of information, there was no research conducted before the parking changes, so all research conducted just after to present day does not have a comparison point.

[cden4.livejournal.com]

It's not uncommon for a proposal to be unpopular before it is enacted, and to have it be very popular afterwards.

For example, 70% of people were against the proposed congestion charge in Stockholm. Yet after it was in place and people saw the reduction in traffic congestion that resulted, 70% of the people were in support of it.