Fact-Checking the "PRT Boondoggle" Blog
A project of the PRT NewsCenter

Monday, September 11, 2006

The Path to Hiawatha Light Rail

I don't know David Greene. We would probably get along great. But the following statement, quoted by the Minnesota anti-PRT propagandist at Dump Mark Olson, makes no sense at all:

Now, I was no fan of Dean [Zimmermann], I'll freely admit that. His work for PRT set back getting real transit going in the metro area quite a few years. In the end, he was a fairly ineffective councilmember but he did just enough damage to transit by diverting resources to pie-in-the-sky vaporware that has not a chance of succeeding. He simultaneously encouraged anti-transit legislators to gum up the conversation using calculated efforts to sell PRT as "real transit" in order to kill systems like LRT that are proven to work. This did not, in my mind, serve the community. Source
How can Dean Zimmermann be said to have "set back getting real transit" when Mr. Greene's preferred LRT program, the Hiawatha Line, broke ground in 2001 and opened in 2004-- all during Zimmermann's term in office? That said, what was the "just enough damage"? Where is the listing of resources that he alleges were diverted to PRT? How much money, exactly? How many miles of LRT could that have built? What state or local appropriations or tax credits did PRT receive? How much of that was actually diverted from light rail? Why then is Minnesota PRT development woefully underfunded? Did anti-transit legislators really need PRT, or Zimmermann's encouragement? They would have been anti-transit anyway.

Don't just parrot the conventional wisdom, especially when it's circulated by the Minnesota anti-PRT propagandist. It's the right wing that blindly follows; you have to do your own homework.



gPRT

1 comment:

A Transportation Enthusiast said...

I've seen a lot of this kind of lazy parroting, from otherwise reasonable people. They just take Avicult's words as fact, especially when they're aligned with his pro-LRT beliefs.

In this case, the mere discussion of PRT seems to be ridiculed by Ken and his followers. In his twisted world view, debate of PRT in a transit meeting is to be condemned as anti-transit heresy, even though discussion and debate is fundamental to the democratic process.

He's managed to convince himself that all these "PRTistas" are actually playing the roles he's concocted for them in his mental morality play. He's so immersed in this conspiracy crap that anyone who even mentions PRT in conversation is immediately and permanently tagged as an agent of evil. It's very much a religious stance he's taken, which is really ironic since he's the one hurling accusations of cultism at the other side.

The cartoonist only sees the world in terms of black and white.