Seattle vs. Jakarta: The Monorail Challenge

My ongoing quest to figure out why Jakarta can build a 2-line, 16 mile monorail system twice as fast and for a third of the cost as Seattle's 1-line, 14 mile system - thehim (email me)

Part 1 - 7/19/04 - The Incident at KMart

Part 2 - 7/24/04 - The Power of NIMBY

Part 3 - 8/1/04 - Jakarta's Herculean Efficiency

Part 4 - 8/21/04 - Seattle Traffic

Part 5 - 10/22/04 - Recall or Retardation?

Kermit breaks down the issue - 11/8/04 (separate blog post)

Part 6 - 11/29/04 - Jakarta Traffic

Part 7 - 3/31/05 - Seattle Makes a Comeback

Part 8 - 7/30/05 - I am Not a Journalist

Part 9 - 10/11/05 - Seattle on the Ropes

Part 10 - 11/6/05 - The Usual Suspects

Part 11 - 7/19/06 - Inching to our fiery death with helmets on - in pursuit of liberty

Back to Blog Reload

Part 1 - The Incident at KMart - 7/19/04

I had a brief run-in with a signature collector outside a KMart in North Seattle over the weekend.  He was collecting signatures to force a recall of the vote that allowed for the monorail to be built from North Seattle to South Seattle.  I refused to sign, he got uppity, I yelled back, trip to KMart ruined.  His main point though, I gathered from the few sentences he was able to get out as I walked past him, was that the monorail proponents lied during the election campaign, so we had to recall the vote.  Now usually, Washingtonians try their damnedest not to act like those obnoxious crazy Californians, but now that their governor can deem us girlie-men if we don't, we evidently have no choice. 
 
Now, if I wasn't with theher (what, you think I was going to KMart by myself?) and had some time to rap with the fellow (who looked like your average friendly Seattle Kerry voter), I might have posed the following question:
 
If you had to choose between Kerry telling a lie and winning the election and Kerry telling the truth and losing it, which would you pick? 
 
On a related note, the city of Jakarta, the capital and largest city in Indonesia, is also building a monorail these days.  Jakarta is an emerging but still third world city with over 10 million people (Seattle: 3 mil) and an average per capita income of $5,018 (Seattle: $41,000).   Let's see the tale of the tape:
 
Monorail Length:
Jakarta: 16 miles (two lines)
Seattle: 14 miles (one line)
 
Work began:
Jakarta: June
Seattle: The signature collector mumbled something about digging, but I don't see anything on the web
 
Estimated Completion Date:
Jakarta: Early 2007
Seattle: Late 2007
 
Cost:
Jakarta: $540 million
Seattle: $1.739 billion
 
Now, can someone please explain to me why the city of Jakarta can build a longer monorail system for a third of the cost, and about a year faster than the city where much of the world's software and commerical jets are made?  Am I missing something?  I understand things like labor will cost less over there, but over a billion dollars less?  And they'll work faster too?  Is it geography, the value of the land that needs to be repossessed?  Or is just whiny bitches with clipboards that can't handle the fact that politicians lie and therefore hold up the process just to make a point about honesty?  Didn't we already go through this nonsense with Clinton?  If you don't want politicians to lie, pay attention the first time!

Part 2 - The Power of NIMBY - 7/24/04

Today, I'll look into more of the details of what's happening in Seattle.

In my last post, I didn't know yet whether construction had begun. According to this, construction will begin next year. However the end date for the project was also moved back to 2009, in order to save money by not having to plan for a partial opening.

So now, the accurate breakdown is this:

Seattle (to build 14 miles of monorail for $1.739 billion)
Length of time: 4.5 years

Jakarta (to build 16 miles of monorail for $540 million)
Length of time: 2.5 years

What is the root cause of our inefficiency? Is it bad planning? Lazy, overpaid workers? Or are we just simply living in a country of people that expect to have something for nothing all the time and whine and moan about having to pay taxes to finance something that we all need? Or is there something else in the middle of all this?

Here is a pro-monorail site.

Here is Monorail Recall site.

The Monorail Recall site has a list of 23 reasons to recall the monorail. I was going to start there and break them down, but the pro-monorail has already done this quite well.

So why is the Monorail Recall site so adamant about stopping the monorail? I noticed the list of businesses where you can pick up a petition. Here's the breakdown of their addresses (number of businesses on those addresses):

15th Ave NW - (4)
Elliott Ave - (1)
Queen Anne Ave NW - (1)
2nd Ave - (3)
1st Ave - (1)
Admiral Way - (1)
42nd Ave SW - (2)
California Ave - (5)

So let's take a quick look at the map of the proposed monorail route here.

It goes down 15th Ave, turns onto Elliott, crosses over Queen Anne Ave, goes down 2nd Ave, heads down across the West Seattle Bridge, passes the Admiral Way exit and goes down 42nd Ave and California Ave. Wouldn't it have bolstered their cause to have maybe 1 business (just 1!) that can't be accused of NIMBYism here?

There's more to discuss about the actual individuals funding this monorail recall, but I'll save that for another day. Please add a comment or send me a mail if you have any good info. I'm now on some mailing lists here, so hopefully, I'll have some more interesting updates soon.

Part 3 - Jakarta's Herculean Efficiency - 8/1/04

I'm looking at Jakarta today. What is the root of their Herculean efficiency?

One thought that immediately comes to mind is motivation. Are they more motivated than us to build this thing? I watched the movie Singles last night for the first time since I moved here in 1997. In that movie, Tom Skerritt has a short appearance as Seattle's mayor. He tells the main character, who's working on a Supertrain, that people here won't give up their cars. Now I don't need a movie to tell me that; I live here, and I see firsthand all the people shaving and putting on make-up while they inch along the freeway. But this article about Jakarta tells us how similar we all are, no matter what language we speak or what flag we salute:

This year, authorities inaugurated new bus lanes with luxury buses. But observers say many commuters still prefer to sit in their cars in traffic jams rather than take buses or trains.

But this isn't the only way that the situation in Jakarta is similar to Seattle. From the Herald Tribune:

Public transport in the city, which has a population of eight million, consists mainly of buses, many of them old and polluting, and minibuses.

So for the most part, both cities are starting from the same problems, and the same existing infrastructure. Of course, the Seattle buses aren't quite as old or as unsafe for the environment, but they get stuck in the same nightmarish traffic, just as they do in Jakarta.

So where's the difference? Is it from a financial standpoint?

The Seattle monorail will be financed by a tax on car registration, which always gets a lot of panties in a bunch around here. The cost has slowly crept up from $1.2 billion to around $1.7 billion, but since this only applies to people living in the city of Seattle, we don't have to worry about suburban based Tim Eyman and his devoted following of tax-whineys. But there is opposition, and it is growing.

In Jakarta, I can't quite figure out where the money is coming from. This article in the Jakarta Post mentions the following:

Separately, chairman of City Council Commission D for development affairs Koeswadi Soesilohardjo said the commission did not know about the details of the project, including the construction time frame, as the monorail was not funded by the city budget.

Not funded by the city budget? Man, that's a sweet deal. Can Seattle pull that off? More from the Herald Tribune:

Jakarta Monorail, the consortium carrying out the project, consists of Indonesia Transit Central and the Omnico Consortium which represents companies from Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. The Japanese company Hitachi will supply materials and technology needed for the construction, which will create 10,000 jobs, and Singapore MRT will be a partner in the system's operation, said Sukmawaty Syukur, director of Jakarta Monorail.

Sutiyoso, the governor of the capital, said the project proved "that Jakarta is still an attractive investment destination in the eyes of foreign investors."

Interesting, but that doesn't answer where exactly the money comes from, or more importantly, why can't American businesses do the same things here? It seems like this arrangement is truly a way for the capitalist instincts of companies to provide for investment in a public need to bring about returns both in having a reputation for getting things done and for building a better infrastructure for the entire economy to move forward. Even if the monorail turns out not to be a cash cow, it opens up doors down the road for better opportunities in Jakarta. Why can't this attitude prevail in Seattle? If there are companies willing to invest in Jakarta, why aren't there companies willing to invest in Seattle? Is it because the citizens in Seattle have more power here to make ridiculous NIMBY protests that drive up costs? Is it because we have people so ideologically opposed to public transit that they will fight something that most people find necessary? Is it over-eager environmentalism that will kill the feasibility of any project? Is it Seattle city politics knowing that they will all be facing re-election at some point while the monorail is still being built and people are paying taxes for something they can't use yet?

Too many questions, too few answers at this point. But before we all move to Jakarta, remember, it's not over till the fat lady sings. From the Environmental News Network:

Previous agreements to build monorails [in Jakarta] fell through because of poor planning and corruption, critics say.

I guess it's too early to predict which city's citizens will be communiting to work at an elevation of 20 feet, but my money is still on them.

Part 4 - Seattle Traffic - 8/21/04

The latest news from here in Seattle is that the Monorail Recall petition, a 'grassroots' effort to force a recall on last year's vote authorizing the monorail, was rejected by a King County Superior Court judge. This 'grassroots' effort was led by renowned man of the people, downtown business developer C. Montgomery Burns Martin Selig, who is giving piles of cash for the noble cause of ensuring that more people will have to pay to park in his buildings. It was also supported by a series of businesses that are all located remarkably close to the proposed monorail route.

The recall effort now appears doomed, and that's good news for us Seattle residents, who already suffer through some of the worst traffic in the United States. On that list of the worst traffic cities (from 2002), Seattle is only four, but you also have to keep in mind that this was a ranking of hours, and Seattle is the smallest metro area in the top 10. As a resident of Seattle for 7 years, and someone who has driven in each of the three cities ahead of Seattle on that list, I will gladly go bummer for bummer, George Costanza style, with anyone from Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Washington who thinks their traffic is worse. Before you take up that challenge, ask yourself this:

Would you consider selling your car and not replacing it when your only method of getting to and from work was to take 3 buses?

After having to commute from my home in Seattle to my office in Redmond for a couple of years, my patience ran out and I finally ditched the wheels last spring. It's not so much the volume of traffic out here that makes it such a pain, it's the skill of the drivers. I learned to drive on the East Coast and did a lot of driving around the East Coast and the Midwest before I moved out to Seattle. I've driven through New York and Philadelphia where you have to be aggressive and alert. I've driven around Chicago and Detroit where driving 80 on a crowded freeway is not that unusual. And then I moved out to Seattle where everyone drives like they just awoke from a ten year coma. Even after 5 years, I've never been able to adjust.

I have absolutely no regrets though. My days of getting $590 speeding tickets from asshole Bellevue cops are over, I'm saving money, and I'm getting more exercise. My only modes of transportation these days are bus (I've moved and now have a one-bus direct commute), Flexcar, and whenever theher drives my ass around. She rarely lets me drive her car though, as she's still convinced that I can't drive the way I do and not crash into things. She's a Seattle native.

But despite the fact that Seattle drivers no longer have to worry about me disrupting their phone calls or causing them to spill their lattes on the newspapers they're reading while they drive, there's still plenty of problems for them to deal with.

- There's minimal rail alternative to driving here. There's a commuter train called the Sounder, but it only runs one train a day. If your work schedule is not 8:30 to 5:00, you're out of luck. This is the only major city anywhere outside of maybe L.A. that I've been to where you can't catch some kind of train from the airport to get into the city.

- The current Seattle Monorail, a short touristy track that takes people from the Space Needle to downtown, caught fire in May and is closed for the rest of the year

- The 520 bridge needs to be widened or replaced, but it's way too expensive and any new bridge will disrupt rich people somewhere, causing another NIMBY battle that will cost even more

- The next major earthquake could potentially take out both the 520 bridge and the Route 99 viaduct, the only alternate to I-5 going north-south in the city

- Tim Eyman and the tax whineys have decimated the state transportation budget.

Despite all this, I actually do enjoy living here. But I'm resigned to the fact that nothing will probably change in this city until people are physically blocked from being able to inch their way to work in the morning. There's never a trade-off of taxes to convenience that makes sense to people. Even tolls are considered a tool of the devil, even though for a lot of cities, it's the standard method for paying for new infrastructure.

I don't know whether it's a downstream effect of the independent pioneer spirit that initially brought a lot people out to the Pacific Northwest, but for some reason, sacrificing for the communal good just doesn't make sense to a lot of people in Washington State. I don't know how much this contributes to our inefficiency when it comes to making the monorail a priority and getting this almost vital transportation option up and running, but I still don't have any other explanations.

Part 5 - Recall or Retardation? - 10/22/04

In the previous part of this series, I had mentioned that the Monorail Recall effort had been thwarted.  Unfortunately, the fight was not over yet.  On September 13, a state appeals court ordered the initiative to reverse the vote originally authorizing the Monorail to be back on the November ballot.  It now appears that Seattle voters will get their chance to vote on this issue after all.

Seattle Weekly has an article on the specifics of what both sides are arguing.  The Monorail Recall group has changed tactics and is now trying to argue that Sound Transit's light rail plans are the real solution to the traffic problems in Seattle, while Monorail supporters contend that both efforts are needed and that the Monorail is on schedule, on budget, and in a part of the city that light rail won't serve.  The Monorail supporters are correct on this, but the more serious issues involved are more technical.

Jon Magnusson, a structural-engineer from Seattle, has been the main voice criticizing the effort to bring a Monorail to Seattle.  He points out a number of design flaws that could either drive up the building costs, create lengthy repair situations, or cause the entire system to be scrapped in a generation.  These are all valid concerns, but they don't change the fact that something is needed.  The Alaska Way Viaduct is used as an example of how not to do things, but it's also the reason why we're now forced to do something.  The best we can do it learn from the mistakes of the past and build something better for the future.

Another opinion piece in Seattle Weekly cleverly compares Monorail supporters to those that refuse to admit that Iraq is a failure.  But the problem with that logic is that much like Iraq, the ability of people to make their way through this city is already a disaster and doing nothing is not better than doing something, even if it costs more money than originally thought.  The technical problems are solvable here.  Just because someone like Magnusson believes that there are problems with the current design doesn't mean that companies (this is a public/private partnership) that have built monorails elsewhere won't be able to solve them.  That's what engineering is about.  Magnusson originally was never trying to derail the monorail, he was simply trying to raise awareness for the serious issues involved.  He's now become angry over the way that Monorail supporters have painted a smiley-face on a very tricky design effort, but that's because politics and engineering are at opposite ends of the reality-fiction spectrum and have to act according to their nature.  When someone like Martin Selig, with a lot of money and an economic incentive to kill a project, tries convince people to vote with him, it's hard to put on your engineering hat and admit how difficult the project really is.

In Jakarta, none of this is happening.  The reputations of the companies involved are on the line to build a Monorail that is efficient, practical, and will serve the citizens of that city for many years to come.  I haven't found any articles in the past two months discussing the project in any way.  It's hard not to feel that the apparent lack of hand-wringing over trusting the engineers to get things right is why Jakartans will be cruising above their traffic jams two years before we are. 

The Op-Ed then ends with this passage:

For those who say the current derailing effort smacks of Schwarzenegger-style politics, one might simply refer them to the R.H. Thomson Expressway, the massive 1960s project that would have ringed Seattle with freeway. Voters approved it, then changed their minds. The legacy of R.H. Thomson are those Highway 520 off-ramps to nowhere near the Arboretum, where a freeway was stopped dead in its tracks. I pass those ramps every day, and for me they’re monuments to a saner, sensible Seattle, a city I hope hasn’t completely disappeared.

Yeah, I pass those ramps too.  I pass them every morning on a bus going 2 mph, fucknut.

Part 6 - Jakarta Traffic - 11/29/04

The latest news is that the Monorail Recall initiative on the November ballot failed by a pretty comfortable margin.  Some people were surprised by this, and still in denial about what Seattle voters really want:

Earlier this year when I was collecting signatures to put I-83 on the ballot I encountered broad and deep contempt for the Monorail. One guy grabbed for my petition clipboard and cheered "Give me that. I hate the f*cking Monorail".

Of course most people don't want to pay for and build the Moronorail.

Actually, that wasn't the case.  Most people do want to pay for and build the 'Moronorail'.  That's why the recall failed.  Many Seattle residents want to be able to take public transportation from Ballard to downtown, and from West Seattle to downtown, and they're willing to pay for it and trust the engineers to work out the technical issues.  I won't try to argue that all of these people are informed about the details of the project, but I will argue that it's generally not a good idea to base your reading of the entire city from the people who are motivated to sign your petition.

I'll discuss Seattle more in the next installment, but in this part, I want to explore Jakarta's traffic.  I sent an email to my friend in Jakarta in the hopes that she would give me some insight into what it's like to get around that city and how much the traffic headaches over there factor into the desire for a monorail to be built.  Unfortunately, my friend is either busy, or thinks I've lost my mind, and I haven't heard back.  But I did find a page for ex-pats moving to Jakarta, entitled "Hints for dealing with Jakarta's traffic", that gives me a good start (ok, a semi-serious start) for exploring the situation over there. 

Choose the best time to go out - if possible schedule your appointments to avoiding peak hours, and for office workers an early start will help you beat the worst of the traffic.

Not too different from here, I guess.

If you are going to an unfamiliar destination, check the street directory and tell your driver the address in advance so that he can plan the best route in order to avoid the worst traffic jams.

One of the interesting things about the Monorail in Jakarta is that it will priced out of the range of many of the poorer residents of the city.  As with any third-world nation, the gap between the rich (including the many westerners) and the poor really does translate into radically different lifestyles between the 'drivers' and the 'passengers'.  One can only imagine how motivated the Jakarta upper class would be to solve their traffic problems if they couldn't just pay others to drive them around.  But even with that nicety, riding above the riff-raff is even nicer than not moving for a long time.  Or is it?

One key to avoiding traffic is to have a knowledgeable driver. One who knows the short cuts and alley ways of Jakarta will be able to save you a lot of time stuck in traffic. Encourage your driver to talk to other drivers about which routes and shortcuts they take to avoid traffic.

This gave me a great idea for a reality TV show.  A different city every week, and the best hired drivers or cabbies competing to be the first to finish a course.  Sure, people could die, but think of the fun!

Ask your driver to tune the radio in to Elshinta (FM 90.05) or Radio Sonora (FM 100.9) to keep abreast of the latest traffic situation. People call in to these stations to inform about traffic jams, traffic accidents, etc. This will be particularly important during the campaign period for the 2004 elections.

Back when I had a car, I never listened to the radio for traffic reports.  I never thought they helped much unless a road was simply closed.  For so many journeys through Seattle, there's only one way to go (usually a highway).  How come there are no shortcuts anywhere? 

If you have young children and you are not accompanying them when your driver is taking them to or from school, have a maid accompany the children in the car. The person accompanying will be able to address the children's needs in case the driver has to change a tire or deal with some other traffic or unforeseen emergency situation. Also, some families choose to have their children not travel alone with the male driver, but be accompanied by a female or another female household staff member at all times.

I'm not sure we have this problem here.  I think we're mostly content to let drunk bus drivers take our kids to and from school.

Plan to enjoy the time that you spend on the road by keeping some tapes of your favorite music in the car. There are also books and study programs such as Indonesian language lessons as well as children's stories available on audio cassettes.

I'm pretty sure I've spent enough time on 520 to have learned to speak Indonesian.  But mostly, I just smoked a one-hitter and listened to a Phish CD as I inched through Yarrow Point.  All that time I could've been preparing to move to a place where other people could drive my stoned ass around.

Consider the time that you spend caught in traffic as an opportunity to make some phone calls from your handphone or even do some work. Be aware, however, that handphone theft from cars stopped at traffic lights is becoming more common, so it's best to only use your phone while the car is moving.

In Seattle, people do this too, except that they're driving.

If you like to read in the car, keep a variety of magazines or books in the seat pocket to fill in your time. Many use the morning commute to read the newspaper as well.

Once again, more things I've seen drivers in Seattle doing.

Consider the time that you spend in a traffic jam as an opportunity to relax, meditate, plan your day, or even to take a nap.

I can't quite say I've seen anyone taking a nap.  Although a lot of times, I've been compelled to check.

Always keep a supply of water or other drinks in the car. It's a good idea to have an insulated cooler bag to keep drinks cool and to bring along some snacks or fruit for your children.

It's like a fucking picnic.  And they want to give all this up to ride a Monorail?

If you have a baby, keep a supply of bottled baby food, some diapers and wet tissues in the car, and for older children some books or toys.

Think about having a jacuzzi put in.

Make your car as comfortable as you can with extra cushions or a reading light in the back seat.

And a wet bar.

Rather than leave from home in the midst of daily traffic hours, leave early and stop by a fitness center that is near your office for your weekly workouts.

Is working out mandatory over there?  Or do people have to lift weights to be able to carry all the stuff they need to have to endure the traffic?

If you're going to a meeting or social function, consider car pooling with a friend so that you can visit along the way.

That's good advice.  Maybe all business meetings should just happen via teleconference as people sit in cars all day.

Another good way to help pass the time is to communicate with your driver. Talking helps a fatigued taxi driver stay awake if he's nearing the end of a 16-hour shift. Communicating with the driver can also help you to learn more Indonesian or even his thoughts on the political situation, police corruption and various current events.

If you talk about political situations, you may want to avoid discussing how they ended up having to work 16-hour shifts.

If all else fails and the traffic is just not moving, rather than sitting in the car fuming over the lost time, why not pull in to the nearest beauty salon and have a relaxing massage, crème bath or manicure for a couple of hours, or the nearest pub and have a few rounds before facing up to the traffic again, with a bit of luck it may even be moving at a faster pace by the time you are done!

Show up late to that board meeting totally shit-faced.  They'll understand.

If you're running really late for something really important and are stuck in gridlock traffic (and it's not raining) - simply get out of the car or cab and get an 'ojek' to beat the traffic.

An ojek is a motorbike taxi, and maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't it be easier to just take that in the first place?

I realize that the majority of Jakartans don't travel around in taxis.  Most of them, like my friend, either drive or take the bus.  I have a feeling that the traffic problems over there might put Seattle's to shame at times, and a monorail (or some other rail transport) seems sorely needed for the people working in and around the city center.  In the end, whether or not the building of an alternate transportation solution gets the support of a community comes down to the amount of people who are fed up with their inability to get around.  And in both Seattle and Jakarta, I think we see that.  Is the fact that they're building theirs twice as fast as ours a sign that they're twice as motivated to have it?  Or is it because they're working 16 hour shifts? 

Part 7 - Seattle Makes a Comeback - 3/31/05

Up until now, the unofficial competition between Seattle and Jakarta to build a world class monorail has hardly been a competition at all.  Jakarta, a city rattled by an 8.7 earthquake on Monday, had been on schedule to build a 16 mile two-route monorail system for a third of the cost and in half the time that it will take Seattle to build their 14 mile one-route track.  But there are some signs that the current frontrunner is faltering.

Drilling rigs set up on the busiest roads and sank shafts into rich topsoil that soon sprouted steel and concrete shoots to one day support a 14.8 kilometre monorail with 17 stations.

Now, suddenly, the rigs and the workers have gone and the media have reported that work has stopped.  The company building the thing, PT Jakarta Monorail, insists work is still under way and points to a pile of stone blocks stacked 20 metres into the air, which, it says, are part of a continuing "loading test".

A "loading test"?  Scott McClellan would be proud.

What a director of Jakarta Monorail, Sukmawati Syukur, does admit is that the project is in financial trouble and that the completion date is now in doubt.

The original plan was for the private investors to raise $US650 million ($825 million) to build the project, which they would own and operate for 30 years before handing it over to the Jakarta Government.

Now Ms Syukur says her company needs the government to buy 30 per cent of the project to make it financially sustainable.  She is unsure what will happen if it refuses. 

I think I know.  What will happen is that there will be piles of stone blocks stacked 20 meters into the air in Jakarta for the next 30 years.  Up until now, I was unclear as to how the Jakarta project was being funded.  City officials couldn't comment on where the money was coming from because it wasn't coming from them.  But there's a funny thing about private enterprise.  It doesn't exist to serve the public.  It exists to make money.  And if the numbers don't add up, it will stop working, no matter how many people need what their building.

Back to Seattle, where local government is barely trusted enough to clean the parks, Canadian train-maker Bombardier has decided to re-enter the competition to build the Green Line from North Seattle to South Seattle.

Bombardier's pitch comes soon after its credibility was bolstered by the Dec. 24 restart of its new Las Vegas monorail, which was closed because of falling parts.  "The good news is, we took responsibility, we fixed it, it's up and running and performing very well," said Andrew Robbins, a Bombardier director of project development.

I guess not everything that happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but at least Bombardier feels that it has a reputation to uphold and that it feels compelled to see projects through.  That'll be a good thing because if there's anything Seattle is good at, it's scrutinizing what the government spends it money on.  The $1.6 billion price tag for this project, unlike Jakarta, is not coming from private enterprise, it's coming from a car-tab tax in a city where people are fed up with driving.

The monorail depends on a car-tab tax that is collecting less cash than expected. Already, SMP (Seattle Monorail Project) has drawn $92 million in low interest loans to help cover costs and buy station property.

But economic shortfalls are only part of the routine when things need to get done in George Bush's America, so where's the media irresponsibility?

The Seattle Monorail Project is trying to pare down its plans because the sole bid came in roughly $200 million higher than expected, according to sources knowledgeable about the project.

The agency and Cascadia Monorail have been working to trim costly features since Cascadia submitted its bid Aug. 16.  The estimated gap of $200 million has been privately known for months, sources said.

That sounds like a serious problem, and a case of our mainstream press asking the tough questions and breaking a big story.  Except that it's not.  It's 2005 and we live in the fucking Twilight Zone, so a weekly newspaper featuring a column by a dominatrix is here to point out the real story.

Well, it also "would have been nice to know" what the Seattle Times actually meant by a $200 million gap. Not finding this crucial bit of info anywhere in the Times coverage--Times editors should have demanded this important context from their reporter--I asked the reporter myself. Your paper has written: $200m over. Over what? I e-mailed.

The reporter, Mike Lindblom, e-mailed back that he meant the bidder's starting proposal was $200 million over basic estimated system costs of $1.3 billion. That means, according to the Times, the bidder's first offer was about $1.5 billion. So it turns out that the Times was running screamer headlines and finger-wagging editorials because the initial monorail bid was potentially $250 million below what voters approved.

Regardless of the fact that our most reputable newspaper is a joke, it's starting to look like Seattle has a chance to win this thing once again.  Of course, if they do pull it off, it will be hard to escape the irony that the biggest opponents of the Seattle project were asking us to do it the way Jakarta planned to all along.  Yet if Jakarta wins, it may be a sign that relying on the whims of the free market may still sometimes be a smoother process than trying to deal with stingy taxpayers.  Either way, I'll definitely be riding on (and likely subsidizing) the Las Vegas Monorail before the verdict is rendered.

Part 8 - I am Not a Journalist - 7/30/05

I received an email from someone (an American fluent in Indonesian) who was able to pass along some information he'd read in some Indonesian papers.  He clarified a few errors from my previous posts and gave me some good new info:

• The cost per ride on the Jakarta Monorail is intended be affordable for the average Jakarta resident, about Rp 5000, or 55 cents.
• The breakdown of private investment to public funding is about 92% to 8% with the private investors reportedly willing to pony up more if necessary
• Jakarta Governor Sutiyoso is staking his legacy on building this thing

In addition, he also mentioned that he didn't expect me to put any of that information on this page because he wasn't part of the media.  Well, neither am I.  And as my site-meter tells me more and more people have been reading this page, I feel I have to elaborate on an important fact.

I am not a journalist.

A few weeks ago, I attended a transportation meeting in my neighborhood with Seattle city council members Bob Ferguson and Dwight Pelz to discuss the transportation problems here in Seattle.  I was a half-hour late getting there on the bus (oh, the irony), so I managed to miss Ferguson's opening remarks and part of Pelz's. 

As the meeting progressed and the floor was opened for questions, it occurred to me that a real journalist would have actually had some questions.  Instead, I typed on my laptop about how funny it was that nearly everyone at the meeting was over 70 and that many of them would be dead by the time any of these problems are fixed.  In fact, I almost laughed out loud when Councilman Pelz answered a question by saying that "we're not planning for 2010, we're planning for 2030," and an old man with a cane got up and made his way towards the exit.  Then I spent the rest of the meeting thinking about the South Park episode where all the old people drive away from a meeting at once and it terrorizes the town. 

Other highlights that I recorded in my notes from the meeting (none of which had to do with my original reason for going):

• An elderly woman in a flower dress expressed concern that if we build a tunnel along the waterfront, a tsunami will trap everyone inside. 
• An elderly man asked if light rail would be faster than the bus.  I'm convinced some residents of Seattle have only seen trains on TV.
• A retiree complained about how high the MVET taxes are on his car, and I wondered whether his only reason for still having a car was to be able to drive to meetings like this to complain about how high the taxes are on it.

At the end of the meeting, the lone Seattle Monorail Project representative at the meeting came by and put his bag down next to me to sort his papers as he was getting ready to leave.  A gave him a head nod, and quietly put my laptop away. 

I guess I'm more of an 'observer.'

A few weeks later, I got another chance to explore my curiosity as Dwight Pelz showed up for a Drinking Liberally event.  Instead of talking about the Monorail though, I mentioned some other issue that came up in the meeting concerning parking, which was evidently a sore subject.  So now, not only am I learning nothing about the Monorail, but Councilman Pelz thinks I'm a jackass. 

Fortunately, this city has real journalists who have been looking into the Monorail Project, and what they see isn't pretty:

According to the monorail agency's own publicly available estimates, the Green Line would actually cost $11 billion: approximately $2.1 billion, plus $9 billion in interest payments on long-term, and in many cases high-interest, bonds. That's like taking out a mortgage and paying more than four times its value in interest alone.

Following this news, and the loss of some previously strong supporters, the finance directors stepped down.

Public hearings this week on the now-shaky monorail proposal will be marked by the conspicuous absence of two men who have been with the agency from the beginning: Joel Horn and Tom Weeks, who resigned Monday as executive director and chairman of the agency's board, respectively. Starting this week, Weeks will be replaced temporarily by board vice-chairwoman Kristina Hill, an architect and professor who has been involved with monorail efforts for nearly a decade; construction director Tom Horkan will temporarily fill Horn's shoes until the board can agree on a permanent replacement.

With the Stranger advocating a revote, and the light rail project moving forward, the Seattle Monorail Project is on the shakiest ground it's been on yet. 

I'd say that Jakarta once again looks like the frontrunner, but as always, I have no other news about the Jakarta project (although they have a website under construction).  Apparently, the Jakarta Post doesn't hard link their articles, so when I find something in a Google search, the page is already something else.  A real journalist might know how to get around that.  And to my Indonesian-speaking e-mailer, thanks, but even though I said I wouldn't print your name here, if the information you've given me causes the Feds to come after me, I'll be screaming your name from the rooftops faster than Karl Rove can compromise our nation's security. 

I am not a journalist.

Part 9 - Seattle on the Ropes - 10/11/05

Last week, the annual survey of the most livable cities in the world was published by the Economist.  Seattle's northern neighbor Vancouver was ranked first.  The entire list is not free, so I have no idea where Jakarta and Seattle ranked on the list, but chances are, Seattle is comfortably ahead.  Infrastructure is not just a category in the rankings, but also the catalyst that can spur economic development and provide for greater investment in other livability categories like healthcare and services.  America's infrastructure has been unparalleled for years, but the rest of the world has been eager (and sometimes able) to catch up.  There are no American cities in the top ten - mainly because the threat of terrorism factors into the rankings as well - but my main concern in following the progress of the monorail projects in both Seattle and Jakarta is that for American cities to remain among the best places in the world to live, we need to continue to be on the cutting edge of technology.  

I received an email from an Indonesian ex-pat living in Australia.  He wrote to point me to a message board with news about the Jakarta Monorail project.  Thanks to the 19 pages of posts, some of which are in English, I've been able to catch up on the progress of the project.  Here's a summary:

- The project was facing some financial problems

- A company called Bukaka, led by Indonesian VP Jusuf Kalla, expressed interest and decided to pony up the money

- Meanwhile, Jakarta's Governor Sutiyoso traveled to China and South Korea to learn about monorail projects there

- Sutiyoso came back saying that South Korean company Rotem would be the likely supplier for the cars

- The May 31, 2005 deadline for signing a deal neared

- Several international NGOs concluded that the project is not even viable

- The deadline passed

- Work began again, but a month later they signed a deal to use Siemens Technology instead of Rotem.

- The folks following the project's progress were suspicious

- Workers in Jakarta started building more supports, but couldn't get out when they were done

- Monorail director Sukmawaty Syukur announces that the decision hasn't been made yet to use Siemens

- A report comes out saying that using Rotem will cost twice as much as Siemens

- The Monorail head picks Siemens

- These workers are supposedly building the monorail (or gardening)

- Representatives for the Omnico Consortium that wanted to use Rotem technology claimed that the rival Indonesian Transit Central group, that includes VP Kalla, inflated the cost of the Rotem plan in order to have their technology chosen

- The two competing groups can't come to an agreement and the project is delayed again

- The frustration of Indonesians grows

- Omnico threatens to pull their support

- People point fingers at VP Kalla

- Sutiyoso announces that construction may start in November

One of the striking things about reading this, and other related threads on public transportation, is how eager (yes, that's a Visio drawing of subways and monorails that don't even exist yet) the folks in Jakarta are to have something that allows their city to be seen as being as advanced as other emerging third-world cities like Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok.  Governor Sutiyoso is staking his legacy on building this thing.

Meanwhile, in Seattle, the wheels are coming off the project.  After the $11 billion price tag was exposed, due to poor assumptions on the revenue that would come in from vehicle registration taxes, Mayor Nickels, who has also been a champion of the monorail project, challenged the Monorail authority to come up with a new plan that voters would have to approve in November.  The proposal was to shorten the length of the monorail so that it no longer goes all the way north to the Ballard neighborhood, stopping short of the ship canal.  After losing the support of many Ballard residents, it's not likely to pass this last referendum.  No one really knows what will happen if the vote fails, but even if Jakarta's project continues at its snail's pace, they'll probably still win this thing.

After I thanked the Indonesian-Australian who sent me the link to the message board, he shared this with me:

It is sad that the Seattle project is at risk of being shelved.  Believe it or not, my first monorail ride was in Seattle back in 1988.  I hope people will come back to their senses and start supporting this project again.

And I hope to live in a city that's looking towards the future, aiming to be as livable as it can possibly be.  Hopefully this doesn't mean that I have to move up to Vancouver.

Part 10 - The Usual Suspects - 11/6/05

As the efforts in Seattle to build a monorail have hit roadblock after roadblock, I've grown frustrated trying to figure out what's holding  the project back.  Who's to blame? 

In the interview, said Marc Auerbach, an interview panelist, [Monorail Board Member Cindi] Laws was asked about her opponent and said she "was worried because she perceived that Jews have contributed a lot of money to the anti-monorail campaigns in the past, that Beth Goldberg is Jewish, and that will make it easy for (Goldberg) to potentially raise a lot of money because of those connections."

What!?  It's like when a detective is investigating a murder and it turns out that he did it while sleepwalking.  Why wasn't I informed about this?  I realize that I lived in Seattle for 8 years before I even knew the name of a synagogue, but send out some mail or something.  Hell, even Ed Koch's "Jews for Bush" idiots found me. 

My head was spinning, but after Josh Feit at The Stranger did some investigating, it was spinning even faster:

Yom Kippur services in Seward Park are expected to be unusually tense this fall as members of the secret cabal of Jews who control Seattle continue their bitter internal struggle over what to do about the monorail. 

Historically, the secretive, close-knit group, Zionist Elders of Seattle (ZES), has been known for the unanimity with which it makes its sweeping decisions, such as keeping Christine Gregoire in power, convincing Southwest Airlines to move to Boeing Field, blowing up the Kingdome, running light rail through south Seattle, and trading Ken Griffey Jr. to the Cincinnati Reds.

I had no idea.  All this time, I thought things like financing and finding the right contractor would be the keys to building a monorail here, but instead I've been an unwitting participant in a conspiracy to make our transportation system as bad as the Mariners.  It all makes sense now.  Jakarta has no Jews.  That's why they're ahead.  It was so obvious.

Despite all this, Seattle voters (well, the ones who weren't illegally purged from voter rolls this week) will get to choose a modified - and shortened - redesign of the monorail route this Tuesday.  This is the fifth time Seattle voters have voted on the monorail, and I only have two more days to figure out how the other Jews want me to vote.

A list of the ZES board members, obtained by The Stranger, makes it clear why there's so much disagreement about the monorail within the cabal. Joel Horn and Peter Sherwin, perhaps Seattle's biggest monorail advocates, and Henry Aronson and Martin Selig, certainly Seattle's biggest monorail foes, are all members of the secret Jewish group.

Rats!  And after I foolishly went into a synagogue last month to hear former Police Chief Norm Stamper speak, they've got my face-scan on record. What if I vote wrong? Up until now, it didn't matter. They hadn't made up their mind yet. But if they have, what about Tuesday? What will they do with those of us who don't vote with the rest? 

Cindi Laws certainly seemed sure of herself that they're going to vote no.  Does she know something I don't?  I see on this page that 3 of the 4 wealthiest people in the world are either Jews or Pseudo-Jews living in Seattle!  I can't take any chances here. There must be something in the holy books about this. This sounds like a job for the Zoo Rabbi.

Rabbi Nosson (Natan) Slifkin, a.k.a. the Zoo Rabbi, is a lecturer at yeshivos and seminaries in Jerusalem, the author of numerous books, and has taught Zoo Torah to thousands of people worldwide. He has also wrestled alligators, ridden elephants and giant turtles, narrowly avoided being mauled by a black panther, grappled with boa constrictors on television, and has been smooched by adoring bears and sea lions.

Whoa!  This dude will know what to do... 

You mean, like, monorails? No, scripture does not address that!

Fuck!  I'm doomed. 

And most likely, so is the monorail. 

Part 11 - Inching to our fiery death with helmets on - in pursuit of liberty - 7/19/06

Last November, Seattle voters killed the Monorail project. The last remaining parcels of land owned by the Monorail commission have now been sold off. The Seattle Monorail project became a serious boondoggle, with politics and sketchy accounting convincing Seattle voters to finally pull the plug. So with Seattle down and out, a poster at the Skyscraper City message boards named 'Zorobabel' was ready to declare victory for the Indonesian capital:

Well, looks like Jakarta won the Jakarta vs. Seattle monorail challenge. Seattle's is dead, and Jakarta's comes back to life.

At the end of the January 31 funding deadline set by Jakarta's governor, the Monorail Commission claimed to have secured a US$500 million loan from a Dubai-based bank. However, some doubts were raised when someone discovered that no Dubai bank was invested in Indonesia because of their bad credit rating. A week later, the bank in Dubai confirmed this. Despite this, the Jakarta Post announced that construction was set to resume and Governor Sutiyoso checked out the station designs. The completion date was set for March 2008.

A few days later, a poster named 'Insiders' then claimed that on the day Monorail director Sukmawaty was supposedly signing the agreement with the Dubai bank, she was actually in Singapore shopping. A few days later, she started changing her story and saying that it was actually a group of Dubai banks rather than just one. However, in the itinerary of her upcoming trip to Dubai, there was still no mention of any financial closing meeting. 'Insiders' clarified that there was only a meeting to convince the Dubai investors that Jakarta was truly committed to building this thing.

In March, more problems arose. One of the two major partners in the Monorail consortium, Omnico, decided to sue the Monorail Commission for misstating their financial status and diluting their share value in the project. Both Omnico and the Monorail Commission eventually began hurling accusations of financial misdeeds at each other. A week later, the Jakarta Post reported that an expert on public transportation thought the future of Jakarta's Monorail project was bleak. Then, at the beginning of May, it was again announced that a loan was secured from Dubai to help pay for the project, but it was once again a false alarm. Finally, in late June, the central government offered a blanket loan guarantee for the project.

Meanwhile, construction continued along the Monorail route throughout this entire time.

"Put your helmet on, we'll be reaching speeds of 3" - Crow T. Robot

This post is not just Part 11 of the Monorail Challenge, but it's also the second post in the Mutinyblogging series, my tribute to the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 classic Space Mutiny. During the movie's thrilling chase scenes, the hero pictured above, David Ryder, pursues the head of the mutineers, Kalgan, in adult-sized bumper cars called 'Enforcers'. They were marvels of futuristic engineering, combining the speed of a Segway with the turning radius of a shopping cart. But even as the hero and villain chased each other throughout the warehouse spaceship, they always made sure they were wearing their helmets.

I've traveled from left to right and back again throughout my life, but there hasn't been a time where I didn't think of myself as a libertarian. Despite being called Moonbat of the Day recently by a commenter at Sound Politics, and helping to start up Seattle's Drinking Liberally events, I still think of myself as more of a libertarian than a liberal. Whenever I post something about this on DailyKos, however, I get a bunch of people claiming that there's no difference between what issues I support and what ones they support. This is true in the world of DailyKos, where your political outlook is determined solely by how much you disagree with President Bush. But there are differences between what I believe and what the average liberal believes, even if it tends to be mostly on smaller issues...like helmet laws.

If there's one thing I've discovered since becoming sucked into this bizarre world of online politics, it's that the word libertarian means something different to everyone, so I understand if people think that my attempt at defining it for myself is the ultimate act of uselessness. But the core of my political philosophy has always been centered around the importance of free will and the framework left by those who established this country as a refuge from tyranny. I believe that when the Bill of Rights was created, the founders laid out the game plan for a system that, if followed properly, would ensure that people would be free of having any type of morality imposed on them and therefore would be unimpeded in a pursuit for personal wealth. In other words, no person or group could dictate your behavior, unless your behavior had a direct negative effect on others, and this would lead to the strongest society possible. Government could not be discriminatory when it came to an individual's thoughts, faith, race, property, or belief systems. Over two centuries later, this ideal is still not a reality (and getting much worse in recent years), and making it a reality is what motivates me to post my inane scribblings on the internet every day.

But I'm not going to pretend that every issue we encounter has a cut-and-dry libertarian solution based upon what I've said above. Most issues we face involve situations were the perceptions of liberty for many people are involved, and you can't just point to a solution where everyone's free will is satisfied. True liberty in a society can not be achieved without rules dictating our interaction within an infinitely complex economy and a democratic process to develop those rules.

When it comes to major issues of any type, I believe that problems are best solved at the lowest common denominator - although I'm not sure if how I approach this is the same as others do when they talk about federalism. For example, traffic laws have to exist. We can't possibly have a system of roads in this country without rules. But I feel very strongly that establishing a nationwide 55 MPH speed limit was anti-libertarian (or anti-federalist), in that it was a decision made from a higher authority with no appropriate justification. Things like speed limits should be decided locally, by the people who actually share that road every day. But I also believe that if a community got together and said that certain people couldn't drive on a particular road, it would be up to a higher judicial authority to prevent that from happening. Is that still federalism? If I didn't waste my time taking classes like Thermodynamics and Helicopter Theory in college, I might know the answer to that. For now, I'll just keep calling that federalism until someone at Reason tells me not to.

The reason I place so much value on these libertarian ideas is because I believe that it plays a much bigger role in the overall health of a society than the implementation of any particular economic theory. When people have less obstructions to their free will, that manifests itself in economic progress, regardless of whether an economic system tilts to the left or right. If you're still awake, you probably just noticed that I'm starting to reveal where I have a major difference with many other libertarians. I believe that when a community needs something, true liberty comes not from simply choosing the more free market solution over the government solution, it comes when those who have a stake in what's being done are able to choose for themselves between a government solution and a free market solution. Much of America's foundation is rooted in competing interests and a balance of powers, and I believe that this is a vital one to preserve, the ability for people to demand that government fix a problem when it loses faith in the free market's ability to do so, or vice versa.

A good example of where this leaves me is how I view problems within our education system. If you ask different people how they'd fix the schools in this country, a liberal is likely to say that it requires more government investment, a conservative (or the average libertarian that I talk to) is likely to say that it requires more privatization. I don't really think either approach will work or is more effective than the other. The problem with our schools is an extension of certain aspects of our society as a whole. The key to a child's education is parental involvement, and the fact that we have such staggering numbers of parents behind bars in this country and so many others working long hours to scrape by in low-end jobs, and so many others who just don't care, we doom ourselves to failure, no matter how much money the schools have to work with. When you focus on the issues that keep parents from being more involved, the downstream effects are magnified, and investing in the education process pays off regardless of who's paying what. And, of course, I think that giving communities more control over how to run their own schools can also be a big part of that.

I think the two most important metrics for determining how much liberty exists in a society are 1) how many people are in jail and 2) how easy it is for children in low-income areas to achieve upward mobility. In both of these cases, America is really failing right now, and this shapes my entire rationale when looking at politics. This trend is also being followed by a shift to the Democrats among libertarians, not just because the Bush Administration is the most authoritarian administration in memory, but also because more and more libertarians are starting to question old assumptions about the free market. Why I think this is happening is demonstrated by Radley Balko in a recent column at Fox News:

The article focused on the emerging idea among some public policy thinkers that too many Americans make "bad" decisions. Thus, we need government to nudge us in the right direction, be it through sin or vice taxes, public relations campaigns, or in some cases, outright prohibitions.

...

Where large numbers of Americans have historically made bad decisions, those decisions tend to have been influenced by government. The dramatic, 30-year rise in fatherless babies among the poor, for example, corresponded with a social welfare system that inadvertently incentivized single motherhood.

The reality is that government has some ability to affect our behavior both positively and negatively, but nowhere near as much as most people believe. Consider smoking bans. While I strongly disagree with how sweeping many of the smoking bans have been, many people in areas with smoking bans have found it easier to quit smoking as a result. But situations like that aren't common, and they tend to be indirect affects of government. At the opposite end of the responsibility spectrum, however, I find it laughable to believe that welfare programs are the driving force behind the existence of so many single mothers out there. It simply doesn't make sense to believe that government can be so powerless in getting people to be responsible, but Herculean in its ability to make people irresponsible.

But Balko is absolutely right that sin taxes, bans, and prohibitions do virtually nothing to stop people from exercising their free will. And this is where I find the most common ground with the standard libertarian outlook. It's not just largely inconsequential issues like helmet laws that matter here, it's also a very big one, the drug war. Telling people that they can't take certain mind-altering substances, simply because society deems that behavior immoral, is the most damaging transgression of our country's libertarian ideals at this time. And as a result, it continues to exacerbate the two major problems I mentioned earlier. We now have record numbers of people behind bars which fuels the socio-economic divide between the rich and poor (and black and white) that now severely limits social mobility.

As for sin taxes, though, while I agree that things like sin taxes can't be used to make people responsible, I do recognize that sin taxes could be useful for funding a potential health care expenditure that results from that irresponsibility. There's a distinction to be made about government forcing people to be responsible and government actually doing responsible things. I don't think there's anything particularly anti-libertarian about admitting that government is sometimes the necessary vehicle for addressing a problem and that a community can decide to use taxation or to allow government to make rules as the fairest way to do it. But the libertarian movement today hasn't been about presenting communities with a choice between government-based solutions and free market solutions, it's been about establishing the mindset that the free market choice is the only valid choice for liberty, and that taxes and government involvement are very, very, very bad. And as a result, we've been riding the winds of the free market, mocking those European and Latin American socialists, until it's become evident to many of us that it might not be getting us more liberty in all places.

What does this have to with monorails? Not a whole lot, but the debate over the monorail here in Seattle made me appreciate the difference between my concept of liberty and the concept of many others who call themselves libertarians. As Seattle debated how to build the monorail, I found many people who believed in the central contradiction above - i.e. that if government was collecting taxes and writing the checks, the only outcome possible was one of greater irresponsibility - and that the only way to succeed was to let the invisible hand of the free market lay down the elevated tracks. In the end, though, the one factor that stood above all else in Jakarta's looming victory is that they needed a monorail way more than Seattle did. Having a monorail was more central to the liberty of Jakartans than it was to the liberty of Seattlites. Did it really matter in the end whether the $500 million needed for the Jakarta project came from a bank loan in Dubai or from the Indonesian government? Hell, the workers were building it for months before they even knew where that money was coming from. How were they supposed to know how irresponsible they were supposed to be?

"Damn, I'm losing speed because I'm also trying to buff the floors" - Crow T. Robot

As I mentioned earlier, there's been a shift underway driving many libertarians to support Democrats right now. It's been driven in large part by the Republicans in Congress and the White House, who've become so authoritarian on many basic justice and civil rights issues that it overshadows the long-running economic biases against Democrats, taxation and regulation. Many libertarians believe in an extreme form of property rights when it comes to these two issues and it runs squarely against what many Democrats advocate for curing certain social ills. In a post discussing the shifting of libertarians to the left, Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings challenges these principles here:

One might think that any set of rules other than one in which I can do whatever I like with my property and transfer it without being subject to taxes would violate my freedom. After all, one might think, it's my property, and I am entitled to do whatever I want with it. And any constraints on what I can do, or taxes placed on ownership or transactions, are violations of that right.

This argument assumes that we should take a system in which I am entitled to do whatever I want with whatever I own, and to all the proceeds of any transaction I enter into, as a sort of baseline. This system is presumed to be legitimate, and any deviation from it has to be justified as a constraint imposed on me, or a taking of my property.

I don't think that this argument works. This is not because I don't think that there can be any objections to the justice of various constraints and/or taxes. It's just that I don't think that this particular argument against them works. Unrestricted property rights are not a neutral baseline that we can start from. They are one among the many forms that a system of private property might take, and have no privileged status.

Describing net neutrality can be a challenge, especially if you're a 107-year-old Senator from Alaska. But one thing that needs to be understood is that the ISPs (Telco's like SBC and AT&T) have a legitimate beef with net neutrality. The best way I've found to describe this is to use roads as an example, but with some very important differences between roads and the 'series of tubes' that make up the internet. Imagine that a few companies like UPS and FedEx actually owned the secondary roads throughout the country. UPS and FedEx also still have their businesses of delivering packages for people, but other newer companies could also use the roads without having to pay anything extra beyond what they pay for the roads that connect their warehouses to the highway. Eventually, UPS and FedEx's competitors start using the roads so much and using larger and larger trucks that the roads need to be expanded. The problem is, UPS and FedEx have to do it, so they demand that all their competitors who are using the roads should pay for it, but there's a rule of non-discrimination (road neutrality, I guess) that prevents them from charging the people who are using the roads the most.

This is basically what's happening on the internet. Companies that compete with the Telco's (like Vonage) only have to pay an entry fee to get on the internet, but can send as much data as they want. This puts the Telco's in the position of having to continually upgrade the parts of the internet they own so that their competitors can continue to do business efficiently. For Telco advocates, the solution is simple - just get rid of the non-discrimination rules and allow them to control the content being sent across the internet. This solution feels right to many free market advocates who believe in the absolutist view of property rights. The Telco's own the tubes and should not be interfered with in controlling the tubes. Julian Sanchez from Reason Online recently discussed the issue and came to the following conclusion:

It's true, of course, that ISPs could misuse their control of the onramps to the Internet in a shortsighted attempt to extract monopoly rents, rather than benefit consumers. But that's not a reason for preemptive regulation; it's a reason to see what happens. "In my view," said then–Federal Communications Commission Chair Michael Powell after blocking one local telephone/broadband provider's attempt to cut users off from Internet telephone services, "the surest way to preserve 'Net Freedom' is to handle these issues in an enforcement context where hypothetical worriers give way to concrete facts and, as we have shown today, real solutions." That's sound advice: Hasty regulation that responds to hypothetical abuses may also prevent us from discovering benefits we haven't yet hypothesized.

Sanchez believes that the laws of the free market will do a better job of keeping the Telco's honest. Attempts to extract monopoly rents will be 'shortsighted' because customers will be so outraged that they'll switch their service to the most superior product offering. Anybody who's actually worked in the high tech field, though, knows full well that it doesn't work that way. The dustbin of the high tech world contains many superior products that were at some sort of competitive disadvantage. Even as a former Microsoft employee, I recognize that they ended up in a situation where they were able to use their operating system dominance to boost their own products that operate on that system against competing products that were clearly better. Sure, some people began to use Linux, but the vast majority of PC users still used Windows. The solution involved setting rules for what Microsoft could and could not do. And few people in the high tech world doubt that this was the right way to go.

If net neutrality is scrapped, there's no question that the Telco's could use their position as gatekeepers of the web to take on companies like Google and Amazon by building a competing service and then trying to extract monopoly rents from them, or by partnering with them and making it impossible for anyone else to enter the market. There are a number of ways in which Telco's would find it advantageous to stifle competition and limit competing innovation. This is not hypothetical, it's the likely outcome. But Sanchez has visions of benefits that we haven't hypothesized yet, a belief rooted in nothing more than his faith in the magical powers of the free market.

As supporters of net neutrality understand, the amount of innovation that will arise from the internet is not primarily a function of the money invested in it (although that is a factor), it's more a function of the number of people who have access to it. It flies in the face of the notion that profits alone drive progress, a central belief among many free-market libertarians. The open source movement in software proved this, as large numbers of unpaid people began to develop freeware products that rivalled what was being produced at some of the world's largest software firms. It turns out that people are motivated by more than just money.

The one thing that struck me most in following the Jakarta Monorail message boards was how much pride there was among Jakartans to have their city rival other emerging third-world metropolises like Kuala Lumpur or Bangkok. Jakarta Governor Sutiyoso staked his legacy on building it, and as has been clear from the last few months, Jakartans have been willing to look past a whole lot of incompetence from their public officials to get it done. This was hardly seen at all in Seattle (well, except for the incompetence from public officials). There was (and still is) a strong sentiment among many in and around Seattle that using any taxes to invest in public transportation is a waste of money. Some people are so dedicated to this sentiment that it drives them to complete madness.

I'm not saying that the free market can never work to push the economy forward, or is always a detriment to progress. What I'm saying is that as America competes with the rest of the world in the race to dominate the 21st century global economy, we should understand that profits are not the only thing that can drive progress, but that government can also lay the groundwork for greater liberty and greater innovation through certain projects and investments - and that American pride can be the motivator, just as it was when we made it first to the moon. America is well behind many other countries in broadband access, which is putting us at a growing competitive disadvantage in the modern world. Believing that scrapping net neutrality is the right path to closing the gap will just be the latest example of how free market libertarians have just become the conservatives who manage to get their numbers straight before reaching the wrong conclusion.

"He shouldn't have been carrying that case of cleaning fluid ... and nitroglycerin ... and gel ignite in there" - Crow T. Robot

At the thrilling climax of Space Mutiny, our hero overcomes his crippling lack of acting ability and dives from his 'Enforcer' seconds before it crashes into Kalgan's, engulfing him and the two death cars inside a gigantic fireball. Kalgan somehow lives through this and is seen waking up in the spaceship's boiler room as the movie mercilessly fades to credits. It's hard to know what was more ridiculous though; that someone thought they might be making a sequel to this gigantic turd, or that cars for use on a spaceship wouldn't be a little more fireproof. It is this unanswerable question that I dedicate to the most ridiculous libertarian of them all - John Stossel.

At a time when the President of the United States is blocking investigations into his ability to secretly spy on American citizens, Congress changes the laws to protect him while the media reports the opposite, the 4th Amendment is being torn to shreds, people have gone on cable news to make threats against journalists and accuse the New York Times of treason, prominent media personalities and other crackpots have spoken of killing Supreme Court justices, and the number of blacks in American prisons reaches 578% higher than apartheid South Africa, the most prominent libertarian in the national media is furious that we can't sell our organs for cash.

It was a few months ago that I got my first exposure to Stossel, as he essentially agreed with Stephen Colbert when Colbert questioned the need for the FAA. It was at that point when I began to question whether or not I should really be calling myself a libertarian. Having actually tested flight control software at Boeing (I left there in 2000 to work at Microsoft), it's mind-boggling for me to think that someone could actually believe that. Stossel is right when he says that companies have an incentive to be safe, but it's still absolutely necessary when developing something as complex and costly as an airplane to have advocates for safety who aren't beholden to the company bottom line. I was there in the years after TWA 800 and the FAA imposed valuable requirements that added significant costs to certain projects. It's naive to think that these things would happen just as easily without a neutral advocate with a very strict baseline for safety. The FAA is definitely not perfect, but that shouldn't be an excuse to get rid of it, it should be an excuse to improve it.

This is not to say that libertarians are doomed to uselessness. I have a lot of respect for Radley Balko and the efforts he's put into issues of criminal justice. There are too few people who appreciate the degree of injustice in the drug war and how it affects minority communities, and he does as much as he can with his corner of the Fox News media empire to convince people that libertarianism still matters. But sadly, when one talks of a libertarian revolution these days, it doesn't evoke images of our founding fathers and other great thinkers of colonial America who valued basic rights and the value of dissent over tyranny. It brings to mind a bunch of well-off Young Republicans shaking their fists at the IRS.

The most pressing problem with this flavor of libertarianism is that it derives from the aforementioned contradiction (that government can make you irresponsible, but can't make you responsible) and therefore prevents the libertarian movement from ever achieving many of its goals. It has instilled in people the belief that the average person is much more prone to irresponsibility. As a result, the belief that it's dangerous for government to "condone drug use" by implementing a safe-injection site for heroin addicts actually seems realistic to people who are already conditioned to believe that thousands of poor women decide to have kids just because the government was willing to support them. As for selling organs, I wouldn't have a problem with a system where willing volunteers could sell non-vital organs for a set amount of money. What I have a problem with is putting someone like John Stossel in charge of it.

It's possible that Seattle wouldn't have been able to build this monorail no matter what. But I do think that the notion that government is inherently ineffective has played a big role in the perceptions of voters in this region when it comes to public transportation. It makes a difference in how easy it is for projects like this to get the funding they need. It comes down to a central question; how much will individuals sacrifice for greater collective liberty? As a libertarian, I only believe in one absolute here, that we don't sacrifice our individual free will and our basic rights in order to be safe from threats to our security. Other libertarians believe in a second economic absolute, rejecting the use of government to achieve greater liberty through collective taxation. I'm not on board with that second absolute, and I guess whether or not I'm really a libertarian depends on whether or not one thinks that's a requirement. All I know is that if we carry John Stossel's absolutes to their extreme, we'll all eventually be inching around in individual carts that might blow up like a box of M-80s when they hit a pothole. It won't really matter at that point if someone is making us wear a helmet as well.

Back to Blog Reload