Herman: The recent King County Metro award is a scam

So everyone is ecstatic that King County Metro has been ranked the best big market transit service in the nation. But who named them that? Does that matter?

Yes, it does matter. The American Public Transportation Association named Metro the best. This is a lobbying group! Their members benefit by selling double-decker buses to King County.

This is the height of crony “crapitalism.”

RELATED: The big Seattle con job

There was a brilliant piece by Maria Frost for the Washington Policy Center this week. She explains how Roger Millar, the Secretary of Transportation for the Washington State Department of Transportation, says that solving congestion can’t be done. He says that congestion is part of larger problems with Washington’s transportation system.

But Maria Frost points out in her piece that WSDOT knows they can solve congestion by doing things like painting new lanes. It knows this because WSDOT has already done it on I-405. They were forced to paint new lanes and it worked; they moved something like 500 more vehicles per hour. They did it only because they were going to be fined if they didn’t do it.

So Millar is a liar. WSDOT can fix congestion. WSDOT is working with King County Metro to make driving miserable.

WSDOT says they would need to spend $115 billion to get everyone moving on 451 additional lanes of road. So do it! Take the money from the stupid light rail and use that money to build more roadways.

This would be far more valuable to everyone. They say it can’t be done. But it can.

This all makes sense when you realize that Millar used to be the VP of Smart Growth America. That group supports compact living, walking and biking and transit. Millar is an ideologue. He purposely doesn’t support policies that relieve traffic congestion.