Thursday, February 10, 2011

The #2 city for transit is..

This just in: The #2 city for public transit, in the U.S., is... Salt Lake City! The irony is off the charts.

2 comments:

Mark said...

Yeah he screwed us over on that one big time. Looking at his Wikipedia page just now to see when he was in office wasn't pleasant.

Tom Elmore said...

"Surprised?" Really? It's in no way ironic or surprising that Salt Lake is so highly rated as a "transit city." Oklahoma's Fifth District voters returned "Utah's Fourth Congressman" to the US House six times after his initial election to that seat -- precisely because he did things like robbing them of the benefit of their own federal transit contributions, ensuring that the benefit would accrue to others. Oklahoma voters righteously returned him to congress while he funded the destruction of OKC Union Station's magnificent, irreplaceable rail yard -- even as he funded augmentation of Salt Lake's maturing light rail system with sixty, daily, fast, advanced commuter trains linking Tinker competitor, Utah's Hill AFB, to metropolitan centers in that state. This made Hill the USAF's only Air Logistics Center with "oil-crisis-proof workforce mobility," something Oklahomans apparently did not want for Tinker. It's a much, much longer and uglier story than that -- but when some of us trotted out our deductive reasoning and the evidence supporting it during one of the Istook congressional campaign seasons, "the state's largest newspaper" published a letter from five high-profile OKC-area religious leaders functionally accusing us of "religious bigotry." Confronted with my "Istook file," two of these clergymen immediately apologized and asked forgiveness. The other three never responded, at all, period. With another Istook victory, they'd apparently achieved their desired end and "that was that." Sadly, OKC Union Station's rail facility and the once-in-forever opportunity it offered for affordable, elegant, comprehensive regional transit in our lifetimes is now gone forever. However, there's little doubt that if Ernest ever decided to run for Oklahoma's Fifth Congressional seat again, he'd be a shoo-in. The story told in the article and comments at the following link, however, gets directly to the heart of the matter for those who "can handle the truth": http://activerain.com/blogsview/1571217/mormon-temple-light-rail-stop-in-mesa-az-is-it-an-answer-to-prayer