Hovde starts in on light rail

At first read today's Elizabeth Hovde column comes across as pretty reasonable. It's a technique she used to rely on more in her early days at The Columbian, when some readers thought she might even be a rare sensible Republican. Alas, a careful examination of her column shows nothing has changed. And it looks like Dina is ready to take on light rail.

Hovde has become pretty infamous around these parts for abusing her column to grind personal axes rather than address the broader needs of the community, and she gets off to a great start.

But now those Columbia River Crossing project folks are everywhere talking about a new Interstate 5 bridge, rapid transit in the form of buses or light rail and park-and-ride garages that could land in my west Vancouver neighborhood, playing host to more than 2,000 cars.

How horrible that mass transit might come to her area. I don't know exactly where Hovde lives, but to most people in Clark County if light rail might come in nearby, she lives awfully close to the urban core. You know, the one in which her publisher is building the gigantic new building.

But Dina is a good Northwesterner, and another thing she always seems to do is tout herself as a good human being.

I've always liked the idea of light rail. I have been a fan of alternative transportation and a mass-transit user since I was a teenager in Seattle commuting to and from jobs. I am a strong supporter of living near your work to minimize congestion and to encourage sustainability. Before I had kids, my husband and I often shared a vehicle to avoid the costs associated with operating two. For a few years, I biked to and from my job at The Columbian to avoid driving, taking C-Tran when the rain deterred me.

Well, good on her. Really. Living close to work, if possible, is smart.

The next thing in the Hovdian technique is to paint the opposition as less than good:

And many of the light-rail advocates I meet aren't commuters or are heavily dependent on their cars. Light rail seems to be a wish-list item - to be used by someone else.

Of course, she cites no evidence to back this claim up, because there isn't any. It's just a canard put out there by light rail opponents to foul the waters, like claiming that light rail is "100 year old technology," as if someone is proposing steam engines. It's so interesting how Hovde seeks to discredit pro-transit folks by trying to define them out of the discussion. Guess what: in a democracy, it's one person one vote, and you don't have to be an astronaut to have an opinion on NASA.

Later in the column we get to the real motive and purpose, which is to encourage people to stop the plans for mass transit by raising doubts about those sneaky engineers.

I've talked with transportation planners of various stripes. While they know that plenty of people commuting to Portland live along the I-5 corridor and that I-5 is the preferred route of travel for most commuters (as opposed to Interstate 205), they only have models to predict who will abandon their Hondas and Fords and Subarus to hop on a nifty rail car every morning.

How exactly would Hovde propose that engineers make predictions? Read The Columbian?

But the real reason to oppose light rail is because some loud mouth conservatives don't like it.

Having gotten to know this community over the past decade, I just don't see Clark County fitting into the model. The words "light rail" have always been fighting words here. And it really doesn't matter how people and politicians who live and work on this side of the river feel about light rail; officials need to know what those 60,000-plus commuters plan to do. If you're one of them, contact the Columbia River Crossing project and Vancouver City Council members...

Well, I would agree that people should contact government officials and let them know your opinion, because we don't have a paid editorialist on our side around here. Ever.

As for "fighting words," yeah, we progressives have to fight back against the 28% types who yell louder than everyone else.

As I've stated repeatedly on this blog, light rail is not a panacea, it's not perfect and frankly, I don't think I would support it for Clark County if it didn't already exist in Portland. But it does exist, and building a mile or two of track across a new bridge seems pretty sensible, especially since a mass transit component is considered a de facto requirement for federal funding. The only other option is "bus rapid transit," something Hovde doesn't even mention. If she's going to weigh in on the issue she should at least be intellectually honest about it.