You want it WHEN?!?

Found this on the San Jose Mercury News online today...

(TJ: I think you'll have to set up an account to read the article, but no worries, i'll summarize it for you if need by and pick out my favorite sentence)

Weighing shorter BART line

The article talks about how BART is trying to come to San Jose, blah blah blah, but the best part is the very last sentence...

"Under the best-case scenario, the BART extension would open in 2015, perhaps a decade later if new cash is not raised."

Oh. 2015? ***chortles*** Oh that's wonderful. Because in 10 years, we still will not have caught on and will still be living in Santa Clara, Alameda, and San Francisco Counties, right? We won't move to flyover country, but we'll just stay right where we are and pay exorbitant property taxes and keep having children to sell into various insidious industries so as to pay for our ungodly mortgages.

What we should've done 15 years ago (and budding metropolises, **coughSEATTLEcough** take note) is not pump assloads of taxpayer money into a light rail system and instead extend BART (a regional heavy rail system) to the oft-neglected nether-regions of the San Francisco Bay Area. Yay for SF Bay Aryans.

The VTA (Valley Transit Authority, or silicon valley's public transit agency)'s Light Rail has had steadily declining ridership in the past few years. Most notably, ridership levels have fallen back to when the Light Rail had been completed. This is shitty. The new lines go right by The Great Mall of the Bay Area, and actually, SixH's parent's house in lovely Berryessa. Unfortunately, nobody's riding.

I did the math once (yo, engineer right here **raises hand**). VTA's light rail services about 5% of Santa Clara County. It's a huge, left wing, enviro-fascist crock of steaming SJPD horse shit. "But TJ," i hear you whining and moaning while i cringe because i can already predict your stupid, liberal, cookie cutter argument, "it's better for the environment and besides we shouldn't be driving anyway."

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I'm not mad at you, but now I just sincerely pity you and the fact that John Kerry preyed on your Stupidity. This all starts with a typical liberal NIMBY attitude. A light rail system may take cars off the road locally, the electricity needed to power your seemingly clean public transit system must be generated elsewhere in dirty coal plants well out of the public, blue state eye.

Or you could use nuclear power. Which I'm totally in favor of, despite France's affinity for it. And surprisingly, this is one huge topic about which me and my old roommate agree.

OK back to light rail. Santa Clara County, due to its relatively low population density, would do much better to use several bus lines like the 22 which goes from Palo Alto to East San Jose. Good shit. Unfortunately I'm not on the board of directors of VTA.

Well that's it for now. I'm excited because I successfully predicted SixH's GFY Thursday! We're both in California; it shouldn't be too hard for you to figure it out as well. So for all two of you reading this, e-mail me your GFY Thursday prediction and the first one to do so gets a sweet-assed prize. (TJ: Friends, family of SHoP are prohibited from participating.)

Good shit.