Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Don't Panic / Transit Tea party's newest reason to oppose rail: It's a possible terrorist target
Posted by Thomas Wheatley @thomaswheatley on Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 2:56 PM
The Marietta-based Georgia Tea Party — one of the Peach State's 20 or so liberty-lovin' groups — says it will oppose the regional transportation tax that voters will decide next year.
In addition to the usual reasons some anti-tax advocates have given to oppose the measure, GTP Chairman J.D. Van Brink says a proposed light-rail line between Midtown and Cumberland Mall area — which could be built with revenues from the tax — could become a tempting target for The Terrorists©. Via the MDJ:
“If anyone doesn’t believe me — England and Spain,” Van Brink said. “Now, if we have a more decentralized mass transit system using buses, if the terrorists blow up a single bus, we can work around that. When they blow up a rail, that just brings the system to a grinding halt. So how much security are we going to have on this rail system, and how much will it cost?”
The tea party group's opposition is the latest against the proposed light-rail line, which critics say only serves a few miles of Cobb County and doesn't do enough to reduce congestion. Such opponents have managed to rally local elected officials in a call for the $800 million that's earmarked for the rail line to instead fund... more roads. (It's hard to gauge whether GTP's opposition — or any other tea party group's — will have any effect. Peach Pundit's Todd Rehm eloquently expresses why here.)
The regional transportation tax is still very much in flux. Atlantans have a chance to give planners their input at City Hall tomorrow night at 6 p.m. The roundtable of 21 elected officials who will decide which roads and transit lines will receive tax funding are scheduled to meet Friday morning. They must approve the project list before mid-October.
Comments (16)
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I'm also interested in finding out what the plan is for preventing mustachioed men in black hats from tying damsels to the tracks of the light rail line. It would only take one instance to bring down the entire system -- and then your tax money is just going to waste (not to mention a perfectly good damsel).
This "damsel tying" menace has been overlooked throughout the conversation about the rail line and its time we start looking at it square in the eye.
Cobb Rail Line, I think you just got Tea P'd. See ya!
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I'm starting to enjoy all this. Is this the same North Metro Tea Party group that was concerned about that private school teaching terrorists? Or are these the folks at the debates that cheered for the notion of letting the guy without health insurance die?
To left leaners, the best thing about rail is that people riding them are not in cars. Cars cannot completely conform which liberalism depends. Cars go here and there, wherever and whenever drivers want, no timetable. Cars encourage people to think and plan they are; unsupervised, untutored, and unscripted, masters of their fates. Cars encourage people in what left leaners call 'delusions of adequacy', which make them resistant to BIG government that left leaners love. Left leaners are then quick to call in their so-called experts who always seem to know what choices all people should make.
Cars = freedom. Not just freedom of movement but freedom of expression. People can buy a car that reflects their personality, their taste (or lack of it), their thrift, their profligacy, their love of history, their love of modernity, their favorite color – all sorts of things. Trains are One Size Fits All, just the way liberals like it.
If commie China can’t control the exorbitant costs of high speed rail, what chance do we have?
Passenger rail is a transport method which only works with enough bodies in enough seats to make it pay. Which means that in most of the United States, the geography will turn it into a money loser every time.
Freedom is messy. In free societies, people fall through the cracks — drink too much, eat too much, buy unaffordable homes, fail to make prudent provision for health care, and much else. But the price of being relieved of all those tiresome choices by a benign paternal government is far too high. Big Government is the small option: it’s the guarantee of smaller freedom, smaller homes, smaller cars, smaller opportunities, smaller lives.
How much government do we need? Answer = As little as possible.
Isn't NOT building rail capitulating to the terrorists and giving them exactly what they want: terrorized citizens?
"How much government do we need? Answer = As little as possible."
Damn skippy. Let's privatize roads and put tolls on them so they can start paying for themselves. I'm sick of my tax money going toward the continued asphalt annihilation of our lands.
And let's start charging those guilty of traffic accidents the full cost of clean up. Government shouldn't be subsidizing the violence of bad drivers. I don't want my tax money spent hosing blood off the pavement when the aggressive driver who caused the accident should be footing the bill.
And let's get government out of the business of requiring parking minimums while we're at it. If I want to build a new business without having to pay for construction and maintenance of a parking lot, I should be able to do so without the government preventing it.
And let's get rid of zoning laws that perpetuate the patterns of car-centric sprawl and prevent common sense, mixed uses. "Oh no, you can't run a business out of your home in Oaky Village subdivision. That's against the law. I'm the government and I say so." Thpth.
And Pete, you've hit the nail on the head with the need for "freedom of movement" in our transportation and the BS behind a "one size fits all" mentality. Building developments around the monolithic beast of car-centricity ("cars only and nothing else!") has brought us nothing but a traffic nightmare. Preach on, bro. Preach on.
"Cars go here and there, wherever and whenever drivers want, no timetable." Yeah, unless you're commuting to downtown Atlanta from the suburbs in the morning...
Also, I missed the place on the Cobb transportation projects list where they put "confiscate people's cars and force them to use light rail at gunpoint".
Darin - I like the idea that all freeways should have a rail along side them - but we simply cannot afford it.
Every rail project has ended up being way over budget and not making enough money for sustainability.
funny, this is the same reason teabaggers oppose schools, hospitals, playgrounds, etc.
"Cars cannot completely conform which liberalism depends. Cars go here and there, wherever and whenever drivers want, no timetable."
cars can only go where big government builds roads. i suggest you take a closer look at your ideology. stop drinking the kool-aid pete! don't be a pawn of the lizard men!
"If commie China can’t control the exorbitant costs of high speed rail, what chance do we have?"
commie china has the second biggest interstate system and it's going to be bigger than ours when they finish it
cars = communism. when did you become a pinko commie pete?
"How much government do we need? Answer = As little as possible."
i agree. the government should not be building roads or establishing traffic safety standards. if the free market wants roads, they will be built by the rich for the purposes of charging tolls
anything less is pure kenyan muslim socialism
Pete, not even a nod to George Will much less quotation marks around your copy pasta. That was taken from a Newsweek article in February. But that is beside the point. Who do you think built those roads your driving on? The faulty logic is getting old.
is it worth more to criticize pete on the fact that his ideas are all stolen from somone else or to criticize him on the fact that the ideas he steals make no sense?
George Will actually wrote that garbage? Wow. It was so stupid I didn't think it was a copy paste.
Cars encourage people to think and plan? oh lord!
SEriously though Pete, I've gotten good at adding 8 plus 15 and 23 plus 15 and 38 plus 15 so maybe transit riders are better mathematicians? (if i miss the train at 8 minutes after the hour next one comes in 15 = 23, then next one is 15 minutes more = 38, then next one is 15 minutes more =53) Plus I can read on the train, true often i just stare off into space and pondering my fate and thinking commie thoughts like "god how do I get through another day working for "the man" " ;-)
Though I still do drive so combine that with my transit brain expanding activities and maybe i'm twice as good at "thinking and planning!"
I think all interstates should be toll roads, charging by the miles driven, you know like a nickle a mile. We can start by charging everyone who drives in from Cobb, Gwinnett, Douglas, Paulding and Cherokee counties. I am tired of being taxed on my home to support all these freeloaders from outside the perimeter.
Pete: Shouldn't the government stop building roads? If the government stops collecting tax dollars and using them for roads, wouldn't the job creators have more money in their pockets and be better able to spur the economy?
Are the tea-partyers trying to rezone downtown Atlanta so no more of those skyscrapers so attractive to terrorists can be built?
@ PistolPete - Nice soliloquy. Now let's look at this from a realists point of view:
Cars = congestion and lost productivity. The equal a reliance on a fuel, who's supply is finite, and who's cost is uncontrolled. They equal wear and tear on infrastructure that municipalities have to pay to fix (p.s. municipalities have to collect tax dollars to do this). Cars represent a capability to go/do what you want, and to do it alone. They also represent catastrophic environmental effects. They represent an isolation vessel for millions of people who are completely ignorant to the fact that they're "freedom" to have a car, has devastating effects on the globe.
Shrinking government, translated into less regulation, and individual freedom was pursued by the beloved Bush Jr. It resulted in the virtual collapse of the global economic system, which was only propped up by government intervention. You think it would have been ok to let the banks get what was coming to them? Then you have no sense of what an environment lacking the complete flow of money / credit, is like. It's prehistoric.
Republicans love to fault big-government for all the world's woes, and rail against anything that supports the conglomeration of society. However, it's the support of government that continues to clean up the problems that republican freedom creates.
I'm not advocating communism, but there is a balance. Allowing individuals to choose to live 50 miles away from the city of Atlanta, and commute, because they can get a cheap "house-in-a-box" with 4 spare bedrooms has costs that you clearly don't consider. The environmental cost, not only of the carbon output of their cars, but also of their increased electric use from living in unnecessarily larger spaces; the cost of lost productivity from sitting in a car for hours a day. The cost of the forced reliance on oil, etc.
I have no problem with allowing individuals to have the freedom to make these choices, but the real issue is that we have been allowing people to make these choices without imposing the proper costs on them. Why? Because fools like you think it's ok to have the freedom to choose, but you don't want to have to pay for the costs that it inflicts on everyone else.
Unless you want to live in the woods, and be entirely self sufficient, you are part of society, and you have to contribute to it. Period.
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