Rex explains himself

In today's Oregonian, Rex Burkholder tries to back away from his now famous statement that "every penny spent on transportation is wasted." He apologizes if he "offended" any "transportation engineers, planners and construction crews or my fellow policy-makers and transportation advocates."

The problem wasn't that anyone was offended, Rex. The problem with what you said is that it reveals you to be an extremist.

Your explanation of what you really meant actually makes it worse. Your explanation is incoherent, and simply shows that you want to use land use and transportation policy for social engineering.

You say that what you meant to point out by your statement was that transportation was expensive, and that it is a "cost to avoid or minimize." That doesn't help much, Rex. In fact, it says pretty much the same thing - you don't want to spend money on transportation. You want to spend as little as possible, presumably because you think it is a waste of money.

However, to be charitable, perhaps what you meant was that you want transportation spending to minimize the cost per passenger mile of moving people. That is something I would totally support. Resources are scarce, and we should choose transportation investments that give us maximum value - those that are most efficient in terms of cost per passenger mile.

But although you try to pretend you care about efficiency, if you actually did, you would never support light rail. It is the most expensive and least efficient method of moving people we have tried. So your actions show that you don't care about minimizing the cost per passenger mile - you want to minimize how much we spend on transportation, period.

Which is exactly what you said before.