Orphan Road

It's outside the Puget Sound, so I haven't been writing about it much, but the issue of whether or not to put light rail across a new Columbia River bridge down in SW Washington is a contentious one:

It was supposed to be a community forum without staged presentations, one that dealt with funding options for light rail.

But much of the discussion during Wednesday’s forum dealt more with the pros and cons of light rail, with occasional forays into the future price of gasoline and whether ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were being fought for oil or for freedom.

This, incidentally, is why I love writing about transportation issues. It's something we all encounter every day, and thus something we all have an opinion on. It's the circulatory system of society -- our communal lifeblood.

Of course, this is the very same reason I often hate writing about transportation issues: you can't talk about them in isolation, and it's exceedingly easy for a conversation to go... [ahem]...off-track.