Comfortable Consumption

My little burg, Elk Grove, as car dependent a city as you'll find in America, prostrated itself to the motor vehicle even more with the announcement today that e-Tran funding is staring at a $1,700,000 deficit next year -- and services will be cut.

Wonderful. On the same week this fucking city received a Tranny award for the most beautiful new interchange in the state

we get word that transit will be cut back, curtailed, eliminated, or otherwise reduced.

Gotta love that new $83,000,000 interchange, eh? At night it will become a sight to behold -- what with its classic light fixtures reminiscent of a planked carriageway of a bygone era, anti-suicide fencing barriers reminiscent of a chain of wagons, those wagon wheels marching...marching along...triangular orange cones atop triangular concrete abutments, and the gorgeous concrete keystone at mid-span! We'll be mesmerized by the beautiful trail of weaving red taillights from the freeway to the turnstop on Christmas eve 2017, when another wave of our cyclical bubble economy bathes Elk Grovians with newfound, unearned housal unit wealth to buy new vehicles as consumer chariots to haul their purchases home from the Elk Grove Promenade.

The purpose of this interchange was twofold -- primarily, to shuttle personal motor vehicles to the vacant weed-filled quarter-finished soon-to-be-completed new mall but also to lay the groundwork for a potential freeway connector project from here to Highway 50 near Sunrise/Hazel, creating either a mini-freeway or a macro-expressway.

First of all, there ain't gonna be any SouthEast Corridor freeway. Just like trying to shoehorn in a choo-choo train track atop existing suburban sprawl, the open spaces needed for a new freeway and concomitant on/off ramps were sold off long ago to campaign-fund-providing land "developers," while the proposed route is planned to run through residential-agriculture zoned land whose owners are wealthy and well connected. They stand a better chance of fighting this project off than, say, the poorer, disorganized Del Paso Heights or Oak Park residents. These communities were sliced in half by freeway projects of the 1970s as they threw parades celebrating their new interchanges, too. No. I say Sheldon will successfully fight like Pasadena and the 710, or San Francisco and the 101, the byproduct of which will be tens of thousands of commuters shovelled off to collector roads and stoplights. Just because they'll successfully kill a freeway doesn't mean they'll kill southern Elk Grovian expansion and the hordes of fresh commuters to jobs elsewhere.

So really that $83,000,000 was spent to allow Elk Grovians to more comfortably consume at the future open-aire mall to raise tax revenues for the city. While the cost of car registration will go up another $15 per vehicle to fund state parks due to the state's insolvency, the cost of insurance is rising to account for my and millions of other stolen vehicles, and gas is $3 and will likely permanently arc upward, we build an environment where driving is the only way these residents will get to their new Jewel o' the Valley. Never a long term thought to build a light rail track down the middle of that new interchange. Never a thought for a safe bicycle lane, either. Wasn't even considered by our myopic one dimensional urban planners. Nope. I suppose if we ever do consider building a track across that in fifty years time, we'll have to raze this new one down and build anew, costing twelve times what it otherwise would if we had planned for it today.

And then, just like today, they'll claim that transit doesn't pay for itself! Well, no shit! When it costs $1,000 per inch to lay light rail tracks, what do you expect?