The rag never learns: shilling the idiocy of HOV Lanes over the bridge… again.

Many of you reading this didn't live here at the time or won’t recall the nightmare of the HOV lanes… the multiple, seemingly never-ending accidents, the backups, the wastes of time… the idea that the “pilot program” the democratian babbles about was SUPPOSED to be for 1 year and they just kept extending it over and over again.

It was universally reviled.

As we came to find out, the point of it, which was going to be and ultimately turned out to be a complete failure, was, according to WADOT, SUPPOSED to be to “get us out of our cars.”

From October 2001 until August 2005, the Washington State Department of Transportation ran a pilot project with an HOV lane on southbound I-5. The lane ran between Northeast 99th Street and Mill Plain Boulevard and was limited to buses, carpools and motorcyclists from 6 to 8 a.m. weekdays. It was the first HOV lane in Washington outside of Puget Sound. 

“We were a little four-mile isolated lane,” then-WSDOT spokeswoman Jilayne Jordan said in an August 2005 interview with The Columbian. “There just wasn’t enough benefit to entice motorists in the Vancouver area to give up their cars.”

There’s a fundamental fallacy to the concept:  “Give up their cars.”

Of course.

I have a supercharged Mustang and a late model Mercedes in my driveway.  A bronco and a diesel dually Ford F350, that we keep around mainly to use as backup for the Lewis River Mobile Food Bank.

There is a great deal of money invested in all of that… the former two vehicles in particular.  And the tens of thousands in the commuting public have a great deal invested in THEIR vehicles.

Why on earth would I want to “give up my cars” for accidents, additional backups, road rage and more political correctness? And if ultimately successful, what about those tens of thousands of people around the world who would be put out of work if such a utopia were ever to see the light of day as everyone from parts manufacturers to dealers to gas pump jockeys to mechanics suddenly had nothing to build and nothing to work on?

The rag counts on our faulty memories.  And back then, they ignored the people on the HOV scam exactly like they’re ignoring the people on the CRC/Loot Rail scam.

That battle was a long time ago, and it was spearheaded by the leftist-reviled Sen. Don Benton who pitbulled the issue until he made it go away.

http://clarkcountypolitics.blogspot.com/2005/04/must-have-missed-this-in-columbian.html

http://clarkcountypolitics.blogspot.com/2005/05/my-sources-tell-me-that-benton-got-hov.html

Even the democratian saw the folly of it in time…

http://clarkcountypolitics.blogspot.com/2005/05/columbian-nails-it-remove-hov.html

And then this tidbit from the democrats themselves…

http://clarkcountypolitics.blogspot.com/2005/05/brief-moment-of-common-sense-by-clark.htm

And then…

http://clarkcountypolitics.blogspot.com/2005/08/finally-4-years-too-late.html

Imagine, if you will, how much the HOV lane scam sucked to have agreement from all of these players.

All of this was between 12 and 16 years ago.  The HOV lane was hated by the people from its inception; loved by the social engineering rag and their downtown mafia toadies.  It proved to be a disaster and now these clowns at the Lazy C want to resurrect yet another dead horse that was beaten to death at the time by force-feeding it down our throats… not unlike their never-say-die, let’s-ignore–the-people approach to the CRC scam.

Absolutely nothing has changed from when the coup de grace was administered to that idiocy in 2005.

Nothing south of the bridge has changed, which means the backups continue from the Rose Quarter, the CRC/Loot Rail scam is being shoved to the front burner and the Big Brother types continue to tell us how to live, … all designed, as the then “WADOT spokesman” put it, to get people to “give up their cars.”

This represents social engineering at its most obvious; another effort by those who “know better” to force us to live as they view our lives… another chapter of “here’s how YOU have to live… but not how WE have to live.”

Time, it has been said, heals all wounds.  But these days, wounds require medication AND treatment by those who not only know what they’re doing... but by those fully aware of the patient’s history... and the outcomes the PATIENT wants… and in this case, the patient is US, the people of this county.

We have repeatedly stated that we do not want the I-5 Bridge replaced until other bridges are built… and that we do NOT want loot rail infesting Clark County ANYWHERE, and that includes the Vancouver Soviet.

The rag tells us that when in place, the idiocy of the HOV lanes met “5 of 8 bench marks” but like the CRC Scam, the most important bench mark was never met and likely will never BE met: the bench mark of the support of the people.

But except when it suits them, since when has the rag ever given a damn about THAT?