Mono-Mania

The Seattle Monorail, which has already endured more obloquy than Lindsay Lohan's dietician, is in trouble again.

The Seattle P-I has been screaming bloody murder this week, proclaiming on their front page that the Monorail's proposed Green Line will cost "$11 billion."

The City Council, which apparently has final say on the project (despite the fact that voters approved it four separate f***ing times), has turned into a Chicken Little brigade, led by longtime monorail nay-sayer Richard Conlin.

The State treasurer, Mike Murphy, has no jurisdiction over the project, but is publicly urging that it be stopped. "The average guy can't afford a Ferrari, because he can't afford it," Murphy says, and his logic is unassailable.

The $11 billion figure is misleading--it's the cost of the Monorail over forty years. It's like saying your $400,000 house will actually cost $1.1 million. It will, over the life of your mortgage. Or that your $3,000 vacation will cost $1.1 million. It will, over the life of your credit card debt.

So that latent Seattle fear of actually accomplishing anything, the same distaste for intelligent planning that gave us a football stadium where the baseball stadium ought to be and generations of "freeway ramps to nowhere," emerges again, as it did to quash the Monorail the other 87 times it has been proposed.

Some local officeholders are privately saying that the project should continue. But, if the project is to go forward, what's needed is public leadership, a quality that is rare among Seattle politicians.