Well, ****. Now what?Follow

Kinda useless superhero if you can only use your power a few days a month.

Seems the cities affected by the bridge project are looking at ways to move the plan forward.

Federal megaproject funding will not occur on any major project anymore unless there is a dedicated transit piece. The two options in this case were Light Rail, or Bus Rapid Transit, which would actually have been more expensve and occupied the same amount of space on the bridge. Going from the separate light rail bridge to the in structure design, which admittedly looked cool, was a stupid idea, because otherwise they could have "delayed" that part of the project forever and still got the needed funding. It wasn't that pro mass transit people snuck that piece in, its a requirement for federal funding. The gas tax was to fund about 300 projects statewide, not just the bridge. Borrowing rates on bonds being what they are right now, not building this project right this minute is criminally neglegant. Light rail, and transit theory itself is one of those things that you can literally debate either way for days and still manage to come to 4 different conclusions each time you try. I've heared all the arguments over the years of this project (interesting fact, if you look for any of the televised meetings, you can probably find me in the background somewhere running the audio components. 30+ simultaneous live microphones in the same room with broadcast audio less than 4 feet away and minimal feedback, and they said it couldn't be done! or wait, that was "shouldn't"...), but you're right. light rail fare, as a standalone entity will never pay for itself. the argument beyond the requirement for federal funding for the project, mainly boils down to every single person who rides light rail is one less car passing over the bridge structure, which can only support so many simultaneous cars for demand, but also only so many cars over the structure before it requires repaving. Bridge paving is typically quite expensive, so if you can reduce that significantly you do see a substantial savings on maintenance. The counterargument being that those people were going to ride anyways, so there is no real savings. The other argument is that a major transportation project, acccording to "Environmental Justice" rulings at the federal level, "Always unfairly impact low income individuals and must be mitigated." Offering a mass transit piece counts as part of that mitigation effort, etc. So you're really damned any way you look at it. Don't put one in and you can't build it because half your federal funding is gone and you get sued by suprisingly lawyer equipped poor people. Do put it in, and you get people who correctly notice that the cost of a light rail ticket would need to be about $1,541 per ticket to actually pay for itself. Putting the light rail structure inside the box girder of the main bridge itself actually dramatically reduced the overall cost, because you have to pay for that structure anyways to support the car bridge, so really you were just paying for track, electricity and rail cars, and maybe a 1-2% structural increase cost, which would have been negligable.

The other thing that everyone siezes on is the bridge height issue. Everyone is all "those idiots didn't even talk to the coast guard LOL1111!!" the problem that everyone semes to forget is that there was a new cost guard comandant that came in with the Obama adminsitration. The bridge height and permit issues were already "settled" with the previous commandant, and letters of understanding were sent, etc. pending the final permit which couldn't happen until after the final environmental impact statement was filed, etc. That all went out the window with the new guy who immidiatly said he wanted the bridge raised. The FAA basically came back and said "go **** yourselves Coasties, we got 2 airports that say no to raising it any higher" and so the project looks like idiots through in that particular case no fault of their own.

That city plan article is interesting. There is no way that either vancouver or portland could fund that on their own, even with federal grants. They just couldn't come up with enough matching funds, and portland has others they might consider first, but I could see them coming up with enough funds to keep a project office open for a while. That being said, I do know somwhat more at this point regarding the fate of the current project and what might come out of it, but I'm not at liberty to really mention any of that for now. all is still interesting times for sure...

Seriously, a poison pill? Let's go with this stupid metaphor....

The poison pill was just a placebo.

the ultimate problem

Is that you completely lack self awareness of your own ignorance. Any reasonably intelligent person would qualify your entire post with "I don't know enough about local politics to really judge, but..." Without that caveat it becomes apparent that you skimmed an article about this with a pre-preinted John Birch Society checklist of "causes" until you found something you thought you could shoehorn in. It's a massive political failure, I don't know enough about local politics to assign blame, but somebody fucked up BADLY. Generally, massive structural failures of this magnitude can be traced to the majority party leadership. That may or may not be the case here.

Damn hippies, always changing stuff.

Betting on you blaming things on liberals is the easiest money, though.

Sounds like your standard operating procedure for major public works projects. Here in Ottawa we have had our fill of them. The worst has been a light rail project that was the pet project of a mayor who now moved on into regional government. It was his legacy project really, and is ridiculously expensive. Basically they want to jam a rather large, rather slow moving train directly into where the current bus lane goes on an east-west route directly through the downtown core. It will resolve nothing for traffic, actually create even more issues, and is just a terrible idea. They then wanted to put it underground but the city is a rat's nest of developments, so no idea how that will go...

It too was already cancelled once, and the city was sued by the train manufacturer for contract breech. It's now back on again, and just keeps spiraling further out of control, bloating more in cost with every revision.

I know none of that matters to you Kao... But really I have precious little advise to give you. I know how it feels having the rug torn from under you. It has happened to me twice, though one we saw coming. Well Dell Ottawa shut down, we at least had warning. There had been rumblings for months as the economic shift began making operating north of the border increasingly expensive, and because we tended to actually fix systems rather than trying to find creative work arounds that conned the customer into thinking their issue was resolved, we did cost more there as well. But when JDS went under, I was literally moments from heading out the door when I was called and told not to report to work. Sadly was 2 and a half months in, so I was not one of those who qualified for compensation for termination with no notice (anyone there 3 months or more got a pay out covering the time between their termination and decision from Labour Board of Ontario), and I scrambled to get a job.

I know this is not the best economy, and you will have to either accept the ******** pay or dive into the waters and fight for another job, but I get this feeling you're going to be fine.

Somewhat of an update, and yes much of this will be deliberatly vague at this point, but it looks like at least one replacement position for the two that went away is in place, and there are indications another spot will open up through normal attrition processes. I also recieved an interesting call unsolicited from an agency involved with certain continuation efforts regarding the project which interesting possibilities. Said possibilities would be significantly more lucrative, but for a 24 month duration with similar benifits, etc. But it would mean a major shift, and less certanty than there would otherwise be assuming my current employer finds a way to keep me funded. So, yeah. I dunno what to think on that one yet, but I do have some time on that one as they need to get ducks in a row before they need an answer anyways.

Make a sequel to ESPN's The Decision.

Saving evidence of your blatant tax evasion in case you run for president, Romney.

Good news about the job though!

Exactly that, quite a bit, and alot. Even on this side of the linear puddle. The tricky things, again speaking in theoretical generalities (yeah yeah, I know) is that a federal project doesn't get funded without transit, and the funding for that specific transit plan is currently against the law in a certain state. A replacement bridge at a minimum would also have to involve replacing the interchange closest to said bridge, in order to make the bridge fit, in that same state where it's currently illegal to fund said project. The cost of that particular interchange wouldn't be huge, and the right of way is already owned, but it's still a potential blocker.

The plan as it currently exists would be everything that was planned origionally in the one state, all the middle over the river bits, and then just the one minimum piece initially on the northern state side, the rest of that mess to be dealt with at least 2 years or more later, but as individual projects rather than a mega chunk. There are also legal things that have to happen on your side of the river with a special legislative session to remove a specific provision that prevented funding unless both states wanted to play nice. All of that has to happen before September 30th to qualify for federal funding for this construction year. Which is also contingant on the bridge height permit being issued, which is also contingant on negotiations with the two bridge height mitigation holdouts. There is alot of momentum for this, and there is enough political will to ***** this side of the river over being stupid that I'd give it 70-30 odds of happening just on spite alone at this point, but there are still several landmines that could go off.