More and more places that install light rail are finding out what most Portland-area voters learned long ago: not only is it horrendously expensive to build, it's a crime magnet.
Dallas TX is the latest to join the crime-rhumba line. Everywhere light rail is built, it seems, crime follows. When the light rail stopped at the West End, the fight spilled onto the street at the station.
Surprise, surprise, surprise! It's a small price to pay for a failed concept in social engineering.
Closer to home, Metro's own auditor has royally ticked off the powers that be over there - much as the last auditor did. Apparently, Metro believes that the job of an auditor is to heap praise upon their brilliant decisions and "planning".
Once again, that didn't happen. This auditor wasn't especially strident in her report, but the facts do speak volumes: Metro's vaunted "Transit-Oreinted Development Program" has pretty much taken your tax dollars and stuffed them up any number of bureaucrat and developer shorts. Your tax dollars, after all, pay for the staff of a TOD program that has failed miserably at every turn, even as they offer developers cash incentives to build along light rail lines.
Developers recognize a turkey when they see one, so they won't build stuff along light rail lines. That's where the TOD program kicks in: in Gresham, Metro wound up providing $687,400 to subsidize 24 condos. That's well north of half a million of your tax dollars. Yet Metro claimed that light rail would "spur" development. Apparently, after spending several billion in tax dollars to build the thing, development is "spurred" only after several hundred million more tax dollars are paid directly to developers.
Put another way, the only way that Metro can get the dog to play with the green kid is by hanging a steak around the kid's neck.
It'd be amusing - if we weren't paying for their idiocy.
