The Times of London is reporting that there will be no parking at the 2012 Olympic Games in that city:

The team organising the London Olympics in 2012 is adopting the most aggressive anticar policy ever applied to a major event in an attempt to deliver a permanent shift in people’s travel habits.

The eight million spectators will be banned from travelling by car and forced to take public transport, walk or cycle. Only a small number of disabled people will be allowed to park anywhere near the car exclusion zones planned for the main venues in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow, Cardiff, and Weymouth and Portland in Dorset.

This isn’t London’s first foray into changing commuters’ behavior. In 2003, they instituted what they call a “congestion charge” of £8 ($16.38) per day for driving downtown. It worked. According to the Times, “London is the only major city in the world that has had a decline in car use and an increase in bus and rail travel.”

Ironically, the fittest people at the Olympics — the athletes — will be able to drive in ahead of time.

You want to think that sexual misconduct by teachers in public schools is very much an exception. You want to think that it’s just one bad apple. But the Associated Press article that ran in newspapers around the country yesterday, including the Journal Star, shows that it’s more widespread than anyone would like to believe. Consider this:

The seven-month investigation found 2,570 educators whose teaching credentials were revoked, denied, surrendered or sanctioned from 2001 through 2005 following allegations of sexual misconduct.

And this:

One report mandated by Congress estimated that as many as 4.5 million students, out of roughly 50 million in American schools, are subject to sexual misconduct by an employee of a school sometime between kindergarten and 12th grade. That figure includes verbal harassment that’s sexual in nature.

The Journal Star ran a companion article that listed 18 educators in and around Peoria that had been charged with sexual misconduct over the last six years. Eighteen!

The worst thing, of course, are the lives it’s scarred and ruined. But perhaps the second-worst thing is the damage it is doing to a respected profession. A recurrent theme throughout the AP series is the problem of students being believed. People want to believe the teacher, the authority figure — and for good reason. Teachers should be authority figures, above reproach, and worthy of respect. After all, they’re the parents’ surrogate during school hours. What happens when that trust and respect are gone?

It’s already difficult for teachers to maintain discipline in an era when parents think their children can do nothing wrong. Not long ago, children in another state had plagiarized their term papers and received F’s by their teacher; then the parents complained to the school board and the teacher was forced to change their grades to D’s — a low, but passing, grade. That teacher had to resign because the students no longer respected her authority; they knew they could beat the system. If that happens even to a teacher who did the proper thing (by giving the initial F’s), what happens when the teaching profession is stained with the stigma of widespread sexual misconduct?

When the baseball match-ups were finally settled, I quickly decided who I was going to root for in each league (Anaheim Angels in the AL, Philadelphia Phillies in the NL). There were several other potential World-Series match-ups that would have been fun to watch, too. But at the absolute bottom of my list — the worst possible scenario for the Fall Classic — was the pairing of the Colorado Rockies (because I hate the Wild Card system) and the Boston Red Sox (because I hate the Red Sox).

Naturally, that’s the match-up. Not even worth watching for me. Certainly not worth staying up until 11 p.m. or midnight to watch, thanks to the stupid schedule the powers-that-be put together these days.