The Seattle Monorail Project aims to build a monorail system in Seattle to reduce traffic, get people from place to place... you know... the kind of thing that most infrastructure projects in a big city aim at doing.
How are they funding this? By putting more taxes on vehicle registration. Sounds fair enough, right?
Well, never mind that Seattle voters already decided that paying more than $30 for car tabs was not something they wanted to do. (But hey... since when did the Washington state government listen to their voters? The population of Seattle voted against the new stadium - but it was still built. Who paid for it? The voters. With more taxes). What I care about is this:
They're already throwing the money away.
Everyone in Seattle already knows that there's going to be a monorail built. If they don't, they've been living under a rock - or not reading The Stranger, who have been covering the Monorail for a very very long time now. If you ask a random guy on the street what he thinks about the Monorail, his first reaction is not going to be "What Monorail?". He might have other opinions, but a vacant stare is not going to be one of them.
So all that said and done, and given that this is being paid for by taxpayers' money, why the hell is Seattle paying to play adverts on the radio for the Monorail project ("Breaking Ground This Fall!!!"), or more egregiously, paying for television adverts during primetime? During Survivor no less. That advertising ain't cheap.
They're already over budget. Stop the insanity.
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