As you may have heard, Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat has had some concerns about "Calcutta-like" conditions on Metro buses. When people pointed out that his column was maybe a little "tone-deaf, out-of-touch, entitled, and ridiculous," Westneat responded with another column in which he acknowledged the criticisms (and that his own paper's editorial page "crusaded" against a measure to help Metro earlier this year) while, at the same time, not exactly backing down.

Pointing to news that Metro has found a way to cut fewer service hours than expected—though not mentioning that 400,000 service hours will still be cut (230,000 of them in Seattle)—Westneat throws down a question:

Why is Seattle sticking its neck out, alone, to “save Metro” with a $60 car tab fee and 0.1 percent sales tax on the November ballot, when it’s looking like King County Metro Transit is starting to dig out on its own?

“That’s the wrong question to be asking," Toby Crittenden of The Washington Bus told us yesterday during our Prop 1 discussion. "We’re not sticking our neck out alone. It’s called leading.”

Others at the meeting noted that Seattle now has to lead because the state, in its quest to approve the kind of lean budgets demanded by the Seattle Times editorial page, has failed to provide us with enough money to have a public bus service that doesn't cause Westneat to fume. “Ironically," said Shefali Ranganathan of the Transportation Choices Coalition, "if Prop 1 passes, Danny Westneat’s bus ride will become significantly better."