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Download Petition Page One and Petition Page Two and flyer hand-out
Be sure to run only one page through your printer twice so as to capture both sides of the petition on a single sheet of paper. You need to be a registered voter to sign. You can register online by clicking here.
We have until March 2, 2012 to gather 5,500 signatures in our goal to put this transportation issue before the people of Lakewood.
Hope is not an action plan
“You’re getting railroaded—literally,” (Lakewood Deputy Mayor Don Anderson) told the audience. “The best you can hope for is for Congress to cut off funding.”
All of the documentation of which we are aware, that the City of Lakewood has initiated about the Washington State Department of Transportation's plan to push as many as 12 high speed trains per day through Lakewood, is posted at www.CommunityMattersWeb.com . A letter to Congress is not among them.
Councilwoman-elect Marie Barth said that city officials will “just have to watch how it plays out, take our stand and do the best we can.”
Watching and hoping are twins.
“Doing too little,” wrote Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, “is now far riskier than doing too much.”
Paul Bocchi, also council-elect, feared a referendum – if not overwhelmingly opposed to Amtrak – might amount to giving heavy rail carte blanche to exert their considerable heavy-handed will.
Add “might” to watch and hope. And, to this recipe for disaster, throw in some “chance”. Per Bocchi: “The question is how much effort the city will have to expend to stop it when the chances are not that good.”
Yah, so?
Some parting wisdom shared by Councilman Walter Neary suggested this council is “probably going to be the strongest council ever.”
But “watch”, “hope”, and “chance” are hardly synonyms for “strength”.
"There's as much risk in doing nothing as in doing something."
F. Trammell Crow (June 10, 1914 – January 14, 2009)
"Amtrak has had 36 accidents at grade crossings from January through March of this year (2011), resulting in 11 deaths, according to the Federal Railroad Administration's safety office. In the five-year period ending in 2010, the passenger train service was involved in crashes that took the lives of 309 people, an average of 62 per year."
Amtrak crash chaos caught on video: A tractor trailer collided with an Amtrak train in the Nevada desert on Friday, killing at least two people and injuring about 100. NBC's Miguel Almaguer reports.
Trains will impact life in Lakewood, Tillicum, Ft. Lewis and DuPont
A population at risk of becoming extinct because it is both few in number as well as threatened by changing environmental and predatory factors has been identified near the right-of-way of the proposed route of high speed trains through Tillicum - a tiny community literally on the verge of being run-over by trains and trucks (Camp Murray in the latter case who persists in planning their community at the expense of Tillicum's).
While many nations have laws offering protection to preserve what otherwise would be lost - as in restricting land development or creating a preserve, the homo sapiens of Tillicum - as the residents are known taxonomically (and due to be taxed infinitely along with the rest of Lakewood, not to mention Washington, for this project), are among the only living species in the Homo genus of bipedal (soon to be bi-rail) primates.
Amtrak takes people for a ride – ‘Gullible’s Travels’
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
– George Santayana
“In a riveting tale of colossal negligence and corporate skullduggery . . . auto makers duped the American people. . . .”
So reads, in part, the introduction to the book “Taken for a Ride”. A film by the same title references General Motors as artificially inseminating the American public, giving birth to the notion that “motorization is the wave of the future.”
The gestation period however called for aborting what was literally in the way – street cars. Steel track ran right smack dab down the middle of the road – space GM wanted for its new automobiles. And since in 1922 only one in ten owned a car, Alfred P. Sloan (President, General Motors) saw the opportunity to seize 90 percent of the market share.
Problem: Streetcars impeded ‘progress’.
Solution: Marketing.
Issuing ads across the country, General Motors figuratively ‘sold the public a bill of goods’ promoting four tires vs. two rails calling the motorization of America “the most important event in this history of community transportation.”
It worked. The campaign that would leave the tracks abandoned and the ‘Red Cars’ “junked, stacked, and left to rot” was based on creating the impression “of a nationwide trend away from rail. But there was no trend.”
What happened was an ad-created ‘need’.
Is this same scenario being played out in Lakewood? Are we being duped again, only this time ‘railroaded’?
In a six-page letter dated November 14, 2008, addressed to George Xu, Planning and Strategic Assessment Manager, State Rail and Marine Office for the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT), Dave Bugher, Community Development Director and Assistant City Manager for Development for the City of Lakewood systematically and extensively derails WSDOT’s plan to thrust as many as 12 high speed trains per day through the business districts and neighborhoods bordering the track here in town. Ironically, a similar pattern as was propagated among the public nearly a century ago is once again being passed off as proof of a need that doesn’t exist.
WSDOT’s contention that “the plan” will alleviate I-5 congestion – i.e. “embrace transportation strategies to change driving patterns” – is, per Bugher, “debatable as applied to Amtrak Cascades service.” And, Bugher’s reference to WSDOT’s acknowledgement that “over 80 percent of Cascades trips are leisure-based” leads Bugher to the conclusion that “the plan” is not in fact founded upon the “demand for Amtrak Cascades service” but rather “appears to be strongly tied to marketing.”
More billboard baloney is suggested by WSDOT’s contention that “of every $1 billion invested in rail, an estimated 20,000 new jobs would be created curbing global warming and supporting cleaner energy.” Bugher responds to this and several other claims, calling them not only “superficial”, but “outrageous” since “no supporting data or evidence (is) included to offer a logical foundation for the argument.”
So what’s ‘the real McCoy’ here?
One of the apocryphal tales surrounding the true source of the phrase “the real McCoy” was one William S. McCoy, an American rum-runner captain and boat builder who became famous for never watering his booze and selling only real top-quality products. Nice to know back then that if you were a boozer you could ‘get boozed’ sooner than later.
Which brings us to the point. Is Amtrak the real McCoy? Are we indeed going to be saving the planet by purchasing a ticket to ride? Or are we being taken for a ride?
"Bob Poole and Adrian Moore: Why Highways Beat High-Speed Rail"
"Poole argues that pie-in-the-sky projects such as high-speed rail divert limited federal funds from much-needed infrastructure improvement and fail to tap into private capital funds that could help expand the nation's transportation network."
“With Amtrak now the key to the President’s rail program, a review of Amtrak’s recent performance reveals that this ‘transformational’ event will take place upon a foundation ofepic failure, gross mismanagement, and union featherbedding.” Ronald D. Utt, Ph.D., is Herbert and Joyce Morgan Senior Research Fellow in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation.
“A woman who drove around railroad crossing gates was pulled out of her SUV alive after a passenger train slammed into her vehicle in Everett Thursday night." (May 26, 2011)
So, one commentator correctly observed of this incident that the driver of this mangled mess was trespassing. And the fact that her dog didn't survive, nor her car, was the consequence of her foolishness in attempting to beat the train. 'That's what trains do. Trains win. Cars lose.' To which we respond, so what sense does it make to take a train away from an unarguably far more remote section of track along the scenic Puget Sound waterfront and thrust them - several of them - at high speed, several times per day, through unarguably far more life-congested business districts and neighborhoods?
High Speed Fail - “While not a freight train, Am-tax, aka Amtrak, certainly comes with a lot of baggage.”
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If you think traffic is bad now. .
Just wait until an estimated 12 high speed Amtrak trains per day, together with Sound Transit, are whipping up and down the track through the business districts and along the neighborhoods of Lakewood and DuPont. And then there is the safety issue. Train-related deaths, injuries and accidents are well documented on Amtrak's current track and its far less life-congested and more remote route along the Puget Sound waterfront. The plan to put these trains through Lakewood is thus a frightful prospect.
East-bound on 74th
The railroad crossing arms are up, yet traffic is backed up, and this is before students, teachers, and staff of Mt. Tahoma High School are dismissed to join the wait in line.
And the picture below is Bridgeport mid-afternoon, May 18, 2011, pre-rushhour.
OK, we give up. If you can't fight 'em, join 'em. The following video gives new meaning to flattened-like-a-penny-on-the-tracks. Only in this case, it's vegetables. Making good use of limited space. . . . Right-of-way? There's a right-of-way?
“Amtrak Turns 40…Called a ‘Massive Failure’ by its Founder”
The Blaze, May 7, 2011
Excerpts:
“This week kicks off the 40th Anniversary of the money-sucking, inefficient, outmoded national rail system we call Amtrak. . . . Amtrak loses bucketloads of money every day. The national rail system operates in the red, generating huge losses and has done so each and every year of its existence. . . putting the overall tab for this antiquated, bloated and inefficient system around $50 billion dollars of taxpayer money. . . . Most private transportation companies have been forced to apply real world solutions in these difficult economic times, yet Amtrak rolls on, acting as if they were exempt from the problem. . . . four decades of massive money losses to serve the transportation needs of less than 2% of the country.”
This past weekend "TheBlaze.com joined the 20,000+ Amtrak employees as they celebrated 40 years of sketchy service, high prices, and a government guaranteed lack of competition."
Oh, and by the way: Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood will be promoting trains all week beginning with New York City AND Detroit on Monday, May 8. No, he's not going by train but by plane.
“A 47-year-old Kent man was hit and killed by a train Tuesday night while riding his bicycle across the West Gowe Street railroad crossing downtown. . . . The rail crossing was closed for about 90 minutes for the investigation.”May 10, 2011
Last changed: Jan 15 2012 at 10:14 AM
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