Transit boardings up, editorial integrity down

Instead of sitting in traffic and paying high gas prices, more people appear to be choosing to use public transit, move closer to their jobs, telecommute or make other lifestyle changes.

Huh.  Just yesterday, the Times editorial board came out against Proposition 1, calling such lifestyle changes "a fetching, utopian vision" -- but perhaps the notion that Puget Sound commuters might actually change their housing patterns and driving habits in response to the challenge of packing a million more people into a finite space, isn't so crazy after all?

And speaking of crazy, did the Times' editors really imply that Portland's investment in light rail actual worsened congestion? Local bloggers are having a field day fisking the anti-rail editorial, with HorsesAss accusing the Times' Mercer Island-based editors of calling "80-percent of your readers stupid," while Loaded Orygun disses the Times as "full of shit" for basing their arguments on a thoroughly biased and debunked Cato Institute analysis.

But while the Times harkens back to the wide open freeways of the 1950's, urging Seattle voters to make ours "The City of Buses," the editorial elite down in "The City of Destiny" appear a bit more visionary.  Urging voters to pass Proposition 1, the editors of the Tacoma News Tribune freely admit that it could take decades for the light rail projects to impact their region, with some "of more benefit to our grandchildren than ourselves."  But...

That’s all the more reason to get them started now, instead of kicking them into the future when they will be far more costly or outright impossible.

Now that's the type of selfless, forward-thinking advocacy we might get from the Seattle Times... if their forward-thinking reached beyond estate-planning their children's inheritance.

-- Goldy