Taxation without representation was a main beef of our Founding Fathers. It thrives today in greater Houston. I've never seen the dang train, will never be in a position to ever ride it, and there are no plans to ever expand it to anywhere near where I live.
But I'm paying for it, AND at the expense of the budget for maintaining the roads I have to drive to get to work.
This was a bonehead idea, ridiculously expensive, and which will do nothing to relieve traffic congestion. At best, it will bring added business to collision repair shops.
One of the things that irks me more than anything else about it is when out of towners who don't live anywhere near Houston and who don't have to live with the stupid thing like all Harris County residents do show up on FR and start lecturing me on how my city needs to have rail like theirs does and how I have no grounds to complain when I, as a taxpayer, get shafted by a system that I never wanted, never asked for, and never got to vote for but, thanks to the absence of democracy in Houston's government, I have to live with.
And quite frankly I don't care if LTK and all those other light rail contractors who descended upon Houston built the thing with high tech state of the art space shuttle tiles and supersonic jet airplane engines - it's still a crappy, overpriced, ineffective, poorly designed, and outright dangerous transit system that I never asked for, never wanted, still don't want, and never will want that I'll nevertheless have to pay for in perpetuity.
THAT is exactly what is wrong with Metrorail and every last cretin who pushed the thing down our throats and facilitated its construction without our consent is equally guilty and culpable for the crime against democracy that they committed by giving it to us. Mayor Brown, Shirley DiLibero, the METRO board, the downtown cronies like Ed Wulfe and Arthur Schechter - they're all responsible for it. But so are the light rail contractors who cut the deals to build the thing and who pumped money into the political accounts of its proponents. As far as I'm concerned, Siemens is just as much a part of the problem as Brown, the METRO board, and Wulfe. What they did with Metrorail is no different than what they've been doing for the past 70 years since Hitler hired them to lay power lines to Auschwitz: whoring themselves out to governments who rob their citizenry and abuse the consent of the governed while they run off with a cushy contract and a project that will provide them return business as long as it exists.