San Francisco Citizen

All right, first of all, if you want CW Nevius to Block you from his Twitter feed, start up a crappy WordPress blog and call him one of the following:

“SHARP-AS-A-MARBLE, EX-JOCK, EVERYMAN NEWS COLUMNIST/QUASI SPORTSWRITER” or a

“BROWN-NOSING, OBSEQUIOUS KISS-ASS LICKSPITTLE TOADIE”

That’s what did it, one or the other, I figure.

So now I’m banned, for life, from the Twitterings of the The Neve.

Oh well.

Anyway, here’s what the Nevinator has to say today about the Central Subway boondoggle.

See? It doesn’t seem that the Nevemeister opposes the wasteful Subway to Nowhere.

But he does! Check it:

“Nevius: Chinatown subway plan makes me wince”

“There’s really only one question to ask about the proposal to bore a light-rail subway deep under the heart of downtown San Francisco. You’re kidding, right?“

“Just the initial math makes your head hurt. Basically it works out to somewhere between $1.22 billion and $1.4 billion for an underground railway that runs for less than two miles and has only three stops. That’s not a transit system, it’s a model railroad.“

“Throw in a few of the inevitable cost overruns and this could work out to a billion dollars a mile.”

“No matter. This is the kind of big, splashy project that city officials love to put their name on.”

“Basically, the argument seems to boil down to this - we’ve got the money (as if federal tax dollars grow on trees), the Chinatown community is behind it, why not build it? Oh, let me count some of the reasons.”

“But, critics say, a stop on Market beneath which BART and other Muni lines already run might have made this whole thing an easier sell. That would have created an opportunity for a single station where riders could make connections between regional and local trains, almost like Grand Central Terminal in New York. Instead, riders will have to walk all the way up to Union Square.”

“Oh, and did I mention that in order to get under the BART tube, the subway station at Union Square will have to be at least 95 feet below the surface. That’s nine stories.”

“What is it about that image of deep, underground dirt-munching machines in earthquake country that makes me wince?”

Of course that was from a half-decade back, but it shows how he actually felt about this boondoggly boondoggle, about Big Dig West.

I mean, the Central Subway proposal hasn’t gotten better the past five years, has it? Five years ago, the promise was that it would “make money” for MUNI, that it would subsidize other parts of the system by generating a surplus. But now we know that it will burden the SFMTA and the current projections for the number of riders per day is down dramatically from what people were promising back then.

So what’s a matter Neve? Why don’t you write things like this anymore? Cat got your tongue?

Pak got your tongue?

The Old Nevius wasn’t afraid to be labeled a racist who’s against “transit justice.”

The Old Nevius wasn’t so monomaniacally dedicated to write source greasers every chance he got. 

Oh well.