A high-ranking Bush administration official really did "sex-up" a report to Congress in order to build support for the project. The Seattle Times has the incriminating evidence:
In the heat of a national conflict over rail funding, Federal Transit Administration chief Jennifer Dorn recently said light rail in Seattle would take enough cars off the road to fill "seven lanes of traffic during peak travel times."The Times' own Mike Lindblom fisks the bureaucrat:
She made the comparison in a letter July 11, urging Congress to provide a $500 million federal grant for the $2.44 billion Sound Transit line between Westlake Center and Tukwila.
But Dorn's statement contains a number of flaws:There's more to the fisking, and the article lists a number of similarly dishonest quotes from local officials who are trying to get the public to buy into the poorly conceived and wasteful light-rail system.It compares all-day light-rail use to a single hour of highway traffic.
Dorn refers to "peak travel times" — which implies seven lanes of traffic relief for a prolonged period — instead of mentioning "one hour."
Interstate 5 is filled for seven hours a day, not one. Over the course of an entire weekday, the eight general-use lanes and two high-occupancy-vehicle lanes carry almost a quarter-million vehicles at its pinch point just south of the West Seattle Bridge exit.
You just know that politicians and bureaucrats deceive the public with this sort of thing all the time. For some reason it rarely becomes an issue except when, say, people invent charges of deception when they're upset that a brutal dictator has been removed from office.
Kudos to Lindblom and the Timesfor doing exactly what newspapers should be doing more of.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at July 22, 2003 07:00 AM