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A vote to no public money for this purpose means No Public Money for This Purpose. That includes the security surrounding the event, almost certainly includes the cost of closing roads or parts of roads for the Olympics, and at least opens the door to years of legal challenges over the various...

Scalziand mentioned the grades already, but going "two levels" down is setting off all kinds of warning bells in my mind. If you were to assume that the first level was only 8' down (unpleasant, but tolerable), you still absolutely need a 20' vertical clearance from top of rail to ceiling of...

I find the "imperial capital of the global hegemon" point a weak one when you consider that the thing which DC is the capital of is indeed the USA. If worldwide discontent towards American policies and politics is enough to sink a DC bid, then it's probably enough to sink ANY US bid. Lest we...

Agreed that it was a stupid decision to abandon it, but a lot of stupid decisions have been made in the past that we're going to have to live with. Sure, the station building is still there, but the tracks aren't and they're not coming back. The building itself has been converted and the...

To be specific, the East Side Railroad Tunnel's western portal is hidden away in the back of a parking lot off a side alley on North Main Street, just north of Thomas St. You can actually drive (or take the bus) down to that location and observe the sealed-off portal in person. You used to be...

I'm not sure it's all that unlikely that we could wake up one morning to a metro region where OTP of 50% is considered "better than usual." That's not going to happen overnight, but if we continue to do nothing we're inevitably going to end up there. But that kind of systemic failure is worlds...

It's a fact that SSX is on the table right now because there's money allocated for it and an EIR is being produced. The same thing can be said for GLX and a number of other projects, mind you, but it is a fact that the project is moving forward. Whether it gets done in any reasonable amount of...

The voice of the system is the people who use it - both those that choose it and those that rely on it. As the system becomes more and more broken down, these people will become angrier, and then inspired to action, and the political culture will take notice as a result. Now, personally, I'd...

It's the exact same logical fallacy that's in play when statements like "the political reality is that the difference between SSX opening in 2035 or before 2024 is whether or not we get the Olympics." It's patently untrue. The system can't survive another 10 years of inaction before we even...

Five, because Vancouver hosted the Winter Olympics twice (2010 and 2002.) Again, the move towards fiscal rationality - which I did acknowledge in the post you quoted - didn't carry with it any real attempt to distance themselves from their questionable character/behaviors. But that's a sidebar...

Shutting down the T won't happen. Restricting T use to Olympics travel only on the other hand is quite likely, as the IOC has made quite the habit of demanding that things have all non-Olympics purposes excluded! Besides, that's only a sidebar to the important thrust of the argument I'm making...

And I know that you believe that Norway, Japan, South Korea, Great Britain, Canada, France circa 2006, and Greece circa 2004 all join Russia and China and Brazil on that lofty pantheon of modern-day dictatorships, but that's every bit as silly. The argument that the IOC behaves the way it does...

I just want to take a moment to remind everyone of a post made by John A Keith a month and a half ago. Since that post has been made, we've learned of rumblings (unsubstantiated hearsay, of course) that the IOC considers Boston's reaction to the Watertown manhunt (which in fact included, IIRC...

Re: Somerville Soccer Stadium You know what? Never mind. It isn't worth it. I'm just going to leave you all with this thought instead of the angry post I was originally going to write: none of you have any guarantee that this isn't just going to be a bait-and-switch for a Gillette Stadium...

Spending the money they were granted for the purpose it was granted them. The fact is, plain and simple, there's no actual appetite for moving the ball forward in a measurable, concrete, or reasonable fashion. Any alternative that becomes the preferred alternative immediately becomes the focal...

That's the point of making them half-width or 2/3rd width - they're just wide enough to safely park/pull over your car (or for Johnny Legal to wait in to grab errant lawbreakers) in the event of an emergency but not really wide enough to safely use as a travel lane. Furthermore, because it's a...

It's too bad that the road is anything but. Whatever happened to the days of well-dressed swagger and long Sunday drives in the toy sports car? Man, let's go back to that. The automobile is no good if all you do with it is get stuck in commuting traffic to and from home five days a week and...

If there are logical ways that something gets done, and logical reasons why it should get done, with logical consequences if it doesn't get done, then I'm comfortable saying the odds are pretty damn good that something is going to get done. If we're going to approach this from the argument...

Well, of course nobody in the areas that stand to benefit the most from this are opposed. (I would certainly hope that nobody in this region is opposed.) Where I see the opposition coming from is from places like New York and Washington and I frankly can't figure out why.

There is no capacity crisis between New Haven and New Rochelle and there never, ever will be. The Metro-North "absolutely crushed" portions are the throat of the tunnel into GCT, where all Metro-North service east of the Hudson is forced to go through, and this is going to be the source of any...