The Seattle Monorail Project's multi-million dollar "education" (= fraudulent disinformation) campaign continues today with yet another double page full-color newspaper ad title "Quality of Life". "Get ready for a whole new way of life. A much better one."
The Monorail aims to make life easy with convenient transfers between the Monorail, buses, ferries and light rail. How will we do this? By working closely with other transit agencies,The only thing that is true here is the "aims". None of the necessary agreements to coordinate routes, schedules and fares with other transit agencies currently exist.
69,000 passengers every weekday, 20 million every year can get where they need to go.As I mentioned earlier, that isn't "69,000 passengers every weekday". That is a years-old projection of 69,000 round-trips in the year 2020, assuming the Monomaniacs hit their optimistic numbers, which would be a first.
And what's with the "20 million every year"? Their other ad says "5 million a year".
Most intriguing is the map that the ad uses to illustrate the Monorail's reach. At left is a map of the entire city, at right is the Monorail ad mini-map. Displaying them side-by-side at comparable scale reveals how the Monomaniacs are trying to fool the people into thinking that the Monorail serves a much lareger portion of the city than it actually would.
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The current Seattle Weekly has two good pieces about the Monorail: An editorial by Knute Berger trashing the Monoplan to rip up Seattle Center, and an analysis by Rick Anderson which takes apart the financial oxymoron that is the Monorail: The Monorail can only be justified as a civic project if it reduced the need for car ownership, but because it is financed by a vehicle excise tax, it is dependent on escalating car ownership.
The good news is that it is both legal and easy to avoid the Monorail tax. And you can also vote against this looming civic disaster at the ballot box.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at April 29, 2004 11:26 AMQuit bitching. At least it is above the street, unlike Houston.
Posted by: Laurence Simon on April 29, 2004 11:34 AMLaurence, the monorail is a scam of the highest order. What's to not bitch about?
Posted by: Kirk Parker on April 29, 2004 11:38 PMThe DSM IV may have to include a new psychological condition: Monomegalomania, described as a syndrome in which the sufferer grossly distorts reality in order to justify an unnecessary public transit system.
Posted by: Matt J Kurlander on April 30, 2004 09:21 AMThe unconscious selling factor of the moronrail, was the last gasp of Dot-Com mentality, that is:
Hey dude, we are younger and smarter and cooler and know hypertext and you don't. So just give us the money and we will change the universe - just trust us!
Well folks, we all know what happened to the dot-com business plan. Down the drain fast.
This too will be the fate of the moronrail, which if you really look at it, is really nothing more or less than a BUS ON A STICK. Big WOW. Really big WOW.