Light rail is breaking all kinds of records, fast, and the most urban thing you will find in Seattle.
Light rail is breaking all kinds of records, fast, and is the most urban thing you will find in Seattle. Charles Mudede

There is a lot of talk about how Sound Transit spending loads of taxpayer cash on the wasteful business of promoting Link. KIRO had its in depth report. KUOW dedicated a whole show on this "heavy marketing." And even my favorite writer on matters concerning light rail, Heidi Groover, gave the generally insane critics of Sound Transit's big plans to rapidly urbanize our region the concession that the agency's public relations spending might be a legitimate concern. But it is no such thing; it is nowhere near or anything like legitimate.

According to KUOW, Sound Transit "spends between $5 million and $7 million a year on communications and public relations." That is peanuts not because it is much smaller than what the car industry spends to swamp our mediasphere with blatantly false images (on country roads, on empty city streets) of their climate-changing products but because public transportation is up against 100 years of wall-to-wall social engineering that has successfully convinced millions upon millions that one of the most bizarre and dangerous things ever imagined (driving tons of metal, iron, aluminum, plastic, copper, steel, glass, rubber around city streets) is as normal and as practical and as safe as walking across a park.

This is the skinny: Link's success is much bigger than expected and its expansion plans are gaining political momentum. Now that the system/service itself cannot be attacked on commonsense grounds, its opponents (who must be from Mars, because here on Earth we really do have something called global warming, and much of it is caused by cars, and it's going to hit every economy harder than those puny property taxes and marketing expenditures for public transportation) are now plain nitpicking. We have entered the final season of the baboons. And mainstream media outlets like KIRO are, like coke-excited primatologists who have seized a major TV network, making a big show of this most nettlesome, tiresome nitpicking.