Saturday, May 29, 2004
Kill the Monorail
Seattle's left-wing paper, the Weekly, urges the city to kill the monorail project, which it calls "the people's boondoggle." The paper originally supported the monorail idea because it was "not Sound Transit" (the agency that went way overbudget and is spending billions on Seattle light rail) and because it was supposed to have "safeguards for public investment."
Instead, the monorail has simply turned into another big "bureaucratic juggernaut, a kind of warmer, fuzzier version of Sound Transit." "It's time to cut our losses," concludes the editorial. "Let's prove that the monorail is really better than Sound Transit and stop it while we still can."
French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau reportly once said "If a man is not a socialist in his youth, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 30 he has no head." Now that our urban areas have sorted themselves out into central cities full of young people and suburbs full of families, it may be that cities will repeatedly fall prey to "good government" solutions such as the People's Monorail. We can only hope the suburbs will not be bamboozled by similarly fuzzy thinking.
Instead, the monorail has simply turned into another big "bureaucratic juggernaut, a kind of warmer, fuzzier version of Sound Transit." "It's time to cut our losses," concludes the editorial. "Let's prove that the monorail is really better than Sound Transit and stop it while we still can."
French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau reportly once said "If a man is not a socialist in his youth, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 30 he has no head." Now that our urban areas have sorted themselves out into central cities full of young people and suburbs full of families, it may be that cities will repeatedly fall prey to "good government" solutions such as the People's Monorail. We can only hope the suburbs will not be bamboozled by similarly fuzzy thinking.
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