How Seattle's Monorail Proposal Crashed And Burned

10 October 2005 - 10:00am

The Seattle Monorail was supposed to represent the future of transportation. Now the monorail proposal is "a smoldering wreck." What happened?

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"Today Seattle's monorail proposal is a smoldering wreck. The mayor, the unanimous city council, and the newspapers have all done about-faces and have turned against the proposal. So have the citizens: a recent poll shows 52 percent of Seattleites would now vote to cancel the monorail. What happened? Events of the past few weeks show that even a tax-and-spend bastion of social engineering such as Seattle will revolt when faced with a public works dollar figure so vast that it can only be understood in dollar-bills-laid-end-to-end-would-reach-Mars metaphors."

Source: The Weekly Standard, October 9, 2005