Rich Connelly of the Houston Press has a Turkey Award for METRO:
Since time immemorial, at least as it’s measured in Houston, Metro has been pushing for a light-rail system (or a monorail, or a hovercraft, or any sort of boondogglish type of people-mover). Houstonians, dismayed at the thought of facing an endless series of elections on the subject, finally caved in and approved a massive light-rail plan in November 2003.
Or they thought they did. This year, Metro announced a few tweaks to the $2 billion plan. Most of the tweaks seemed to involve taking light rail away from poorer minority neighborhoods and giving it to rich white neighborhoods.
Instead of the promised rail lines, low-income neighborhoods would get something called “bus rapid transit.” Which apparently is transportation lingo for “buses that look a little bit like trains, if you don’t look real hard.” (The Metro-loving Houston Chronicle, always eager to spread the agency’s party line, helpfully described BRT as anything but a bus, calling it a system “in which rubber-tired vehicles run in dedicated guideways.” The vehicles, the paper noted, “would look somewhat like MetroRail trains with tires.” So hey, you low-income whiners, what’s the problem?)
In one of the amazing coincidences of our times, the neighborhoods that will now be getting rail are represented by John Culberson and Tom DeLay, two Republicans who play key roles in approving federal mass-transit funds. The neighborhoods now getting the Super-Duper Buses are represented by loser Democrats.
Metro’s original plan was just too ambitious, and never would have won federal funding, Houstonians were told.
You know, we’ve all heard of car dealerships offering amazing deals, but when you get to the lot you find there was only one car available for that price. But a $2 billion bait-and-switch, that takes balls.
It seems a pretty clear-cut false-advertising case. Metro ran countless ads during the referendum campaign, with beautifully illustrated and official-looking maps showing where the light rail would be going. Then they, ummmm, made a slight alteration.
It’s kind of like National Lampoon’s Vacation, when Chevy Chase’s character goes to pick up his new deluxe Sports Wagon only to find it hasn’t come in. “Now I can get you the Sports Wagon; the only problem is that it may take six weeks,” says the car dealer, played by Eugene Levy. “I owe it to myself to tell you that if you’re taking the whole tribe cross-country, the Wagon Queen Family Truckster is the way to go. You think you hate it now, but just wait until you drive it.”
We know how well that turned out.
Most of those complaints about the METRO Solutions bait-and-switch should sound familiar to blogHOUSTON readers.
Be sure to check out the rest of Connelly’s Turkey Awards.
