Grand theft disguised as infrastructure building plotted by Davidson County, TN

[olegvolk]

Originally published at VolkStudio Blog. You can comment here or there.




My request is for every one of my readers, even if you are not in Nashville: please popularize this image where others from Tennessee might see it.

Nashville political class is trying to steal a minimum of $9 BILLION for a public transportation project that won’t work, will cause greater congestion, but will line the pockets of the friends of the city rulers. This project was initiated by the former mayor - now resigned after she got convicted of felony theft on the job! Her nasty legacy - a wide variety of higher taxes for everyone forever - is still being considered. It will be up for a vote May 1.

Special interests pushing for these new taxes are running TV commercials and print ads promoting it. The rest of us, people who just want to get by and don’t want to labor under even worse tax burden, got blindsided this year. I wasn’t kidding when saying that everyone will get to pay for this: the taxes are all-encompassing and will hurt almost every person in the metro area…especially those who support local retailers.

Printable version of this image in PDF: https://we.tl/KrW4YMdc4P

The main reasons why this rail system won’t work for Nashville:

1. Not enough population density relative to places where trains work unsubsidized. European cities where light rail works have nearly ten times the population density, and they deliberately handicap their car users with high gas and ownership taxes.
2. Rail space will come partly at the expense of existing roads and will be part of general traffic. As the experience of Minneapolis shows, the rail lines cause greater congestion at intersections.
3. Public transportation in the US invariably gets burdened with restrictive rules, such as no defensive carry, which is partly why it also becomes a crime magnet (see MARTA in Atlanta as a typical example)
4. Limited nodes meant that it won’t actually solve congestion between suburbs and downtown - it only serves a small subset of downtown.
5. Ridership will be very limited for a combination of reasons - we know that by the experience of every other metro area. Even if it lives up to the advertising, it would still cover less than 10% of ongoing operating expenses. Every time somebody takes a ride on light rail, Davidson County taxpayers would be paying nearly ten times the price of the ticket in subsidies.