You Paid for It

We blogged last week on the million dollar bus stop in my old neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia, pulling material from local news media, my old neighborhood listserv and a CBS news report.  Now CNN reports.  CNN points out federal funds paid for $800,000 of the $1.1 million, sequester or no sequester.

I hope you like it because there are 23 more of these coming -- with Arlington County's inside the Beltway mavens hoping to limit per stop costs to $800 or $900K for stops that the riders don't really want. 

The editor of the local weekly (the Sun Gazzette) rag reported on the bus stop as follows, 

The Washington Post was a smidge late to the game – no surprise there –but had a feature yesterday about the nearly $1 million spent by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority on a new “Super Stop” bus shelter on Columbia Pike near South Walter Reed Drive.

It’s the first of nearly two dozen such modern bus shelters planned by the county government, using $20 million that is a mix of local, state and federal funds. (Not to mention Chinese yuan, as they’re the ones funding our federal government these days.)

A friend of mine, who shall go nameless to protect the guilty, was so incensed upon reading the Post story that she got in her car and – those of you in 22207 will shudder – toodled south of Route 50 just so she could see what all the hullabaloo was about.

She was, to put it mildly, not impressed with what the nearly $1 million purchased. Profanity ensued.

In Arlington we referred to Route 50 as the DMZ.  Nobody, none of the limousine liberals in the north, travelled from the north to south (where I and the majority of the black and Hispanic population lived) except under extreme duress.

It's appropriate that this fleecing of the taxpayer (and our children and grandchildren who will assume the prodigious debt) is occurring on Columbia Pike, named such because the road leads to the District of Columbia, where the leadership is ensconced whose senseless and undisciplined spending is driving our country into fiscal oblivion.  When Columbia Pike was originally built it was a turnpike, a revenue raiser.  In the world of Obama and the progressives it is a revenue sink.  My, how far we have fallen.