EDITORIAL; THE CADILLAC LIFE.The Red Line to North Hollywood is just a few months away from finally opening for business. In June, subway riders will be able to zip from North Hollywood to Hollywood in 10 minutes and then on to downtown, where they'll get off at Union Station and have to walk several blocks to work, or catch a bus if their destination is farther away. It will be a beautiful ride for the money - $1.35 for riders, $1.3 billion for taxpayers on top of the $4 billion cost of the downtown to Hollywood links. Cavernous 1. pertaining to a hollow, or containing hollow spaces. 2. having a hollow sound, such as certain abnormal breath sounds. cav·ern·ous (k  v, uncrowded stops filled with interesting and lovely art, and unsullied by too much use since only 50,000 or so trips a day are expected. In other words, the MTA is close to completing a Cadillac subway while the rest of us are stuck with a Chevy CHEVY - Chevrolet transportation system. Which would be OK if there were a reasonable expectation that the majority of people would and could ride in the Cadillac and that it would vastly improve their lives. In fact, the subway won't make much more of a difference timewise than an express bus, once you figure in the time it takes to get to the subway and on to your destination. Los Angeles is building a lot of Cadillac monuments these days, like the Staples Center, the renovated City Hall and the Hollywood project to host the Oscars - all projects that will serve a few while the rest of us are making do with the old Chevy. The billions of dollars that have gone into these projects could have fixed thousands of miles of sidewalks or rebuilt neighborhoods in every corner of the city or renovated a crumbling sewer system. The money could have paid for thousands of talented and well-trained teachers or programs to get gang members to go straight or a thousand other things the community lacks. But no, not in L.A., where the city's power brokers think the government belongs to them and taxpayer money is provided so they can enrich themselves, win elections and build monuments for their own benefit. That works for the lucky few, but not for the rest of us (abuse) for The Rest Of Us - (From the Macintosh slogan "The computer for the rest of us") 1. Used to describe a spiffy product whose affordability shames other comparable products, or (more often) used sarcastically to describe spiffy but very overpriced products. 2. Describes a program with a limited interface, deliberately limited capabilities, non-orthogonality, inability to compose primitives, or any other limitation designed to not "confuse" a naïve user. stuck with the broken-down Chevy. |
|
||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion