At 06:55 AM 5/2/2012, you wrote:
>While this shows some of the good side of Republican thinking
>(there's more), the bad side of the picture was that the Nixon
>administration threw scads of money at the project without any
>supervision. Nixon did the same thing with Affirmative Action. His
>administration REMOVED all of the constraints and supervision for
>Affirmative Action and threw even MORE $$$ into it. The policy seems
>to convey the message that human-kind is basically good. It doesn't
>work for me. Worse yet, there's the assumption that only a certain
>group have ethics.
"without any supervision" is a bit overstated, I think. Both the Jet
Propulsion Lab and Boeing had some oversight duties as well as UMTA staff
.
Perhaps the main problem was that the White House wanted it to be up
and running prior to the election - which resulted
in a lot of short-cuts and budget overruns. The UMTA person in
overall charge of the project was a very competent person,
so far as I know, but he would certainly have to do some things he
was uncomfortable about due to pressure from the White House. Also,
who know what role Senator Byrd played but it was probably of some
significance.
>There has to be a happy medium. If Fed $$$ are spent, then some sort
>of oversight should be in place for any project including
>transportation. There really doesn't have to be a regulatory agency
>in place, as the SJ report indicates. Proper testing and engineering
>should be sufficient, but holding the developers to a contract for a
>safe and efficient operational system should be there too.
I disagree. There are a number of "regulations" that would need to be
specified at the time proposals were requested that would enable the
proposers to know what the rules of the game were going to be.
Emergency evacuation is one. Who gets to make the decisions about
fares? Hours of operation? Security provisions and response
responsibilities? Who is responsible for monitoring the operation of
the system? What kind of liability insurance must be purchased and by whom?
What requirements must be met during the initial testing of an
operating system? I, for one, am interested in protecting the public
interest in the project and getting maximum value for the tax payers
investments in the system.