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Oh, that old line again…

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A group of Bellevue homeowners is alleging that Sound Transit has intentionally increased cost and risk estimates of a proposed light rail alignment, to make it look worse. The agency says it’s just not true, but it’s a sign of how much tension there is in a debate over where trains will travel.

Because as we’ve learned from experience, public agencies always overestimate the cost of large infrastructure projects. The Big Dig came in at a fraction of its original projected cost, and no doubt Seattle taxpayers are due for a big rebate when the deep bore tunnel comes in well under budget. That’s just the way these things work.

(Just more evidence that if you say something loudly and angry enough—and with hand-made signs—our media will eventually report it as news.)

Comments

  1. 1

    you’ll have to pry the suv ignition key from the cold dead fingers of west bellevue’s elite mcmansion owners.

  3. 3

    @1 That won’t be too hard if we just wait a little while. Everyone’s dead eventually.

  5. 5

    Let’s all remember that Bellevue Big Money had enough clout to close a taxpayer-build exit ramp on the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge because they didn’t want us unwashed to travel through their swanky neighborhoods. I predict that cash will defeat an environmentally-protected slough and that the line will go exactly where Bellevue Big Money wants it to go.

  8. 8

    who cares? nobody rides them anyways….

    just more pissing money down the drain..

  9. 9

    They are saying…”sound transit lies to do what it thinks is best”. How much per rider per day is that stupid line to tukwila costing our kids?

  10. 10

    Speaking of “that old line again…”

    Pay raises lag in public sector

    Jonathan Brunt
    Published: Jan 16, 2011
    An analysis of recent wage increases shows that the pay of many local government workers is rising slightly slower than the rate of workers in the private sector.

    From 2002 to 2009, workers in the private sector in Spokane County experienced wage increases of 26.4 percent. Wages of workers in local government were up 24.7 percent.

    Patrick Jones, executive director of Eastern Washington University’s Institute for Public Policy and Economic Analysis, said given recent rhetoric, the data surprised him.

    “The conventional wisdom is that government workers’ economic lot is improving faster than the private sector,” he said.
    http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_1598.....d=sYnH52kX

  11. 11

    Speaking of “that old line” and SUV’s yet again, we don’t need more parking.

    The environmental impact of parking spaces may rival that of the cars that fill them.

    In the United States, there are simply too many places to park. In fact, there may be as many as eight parking spaces for every car. “Parking is the single biggest land use in any city,” claims Donald Shoup, a professor of Urban Studies at UCLA. Surveys of parking spaces show that there are somewhere between 100 million and 2 billion parking spaces in the U.S. alone.

    A recent study found that parking spaces may be just as environmentally harmful as the cars that fill them. “The level of parking spaces shows the level of commitment to the automobile as a transportation mode,” Mikhail Chester, lead author of a study from UC Berkeley on parking spaces, told PRI’s Here and Now. He argues that empty parking spaces provide an incentive for people to drive instead of taking more environmentally efficient choices like public transportation.
    http://www.pri.org/science/env.....paces.html

  12. 12

    @11 A parking space is where an automobile sits and dribbles its dirty, toxic body fluids into the storm drains and groundwater.

  13. 13

    That cars pollute is a given….but the remedy is not an over priced and underused slow train.

    Pity the morons killed the rail along 405 that was already there…

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