Liberal Talk Radio

I see that Sound Transit is touting the Mountlake Terrace Freeway Station as a job creation engine:

The new station will enable ST Express buses to provide service to Mountlake Terrace, where Community Transit’s new park-and-ride garage is set to open Feb. 8. This project will give commuters more choices and make our highways and bus access routes more efficient and safer. This project will also create dozens of new jobs to benefit our economy.

To my knowledge, they haven’t done that before. I guess they’ve realized that infrastructure is the hot new bandwagon if you want to get on the federal gravy train (wow, that’s a mangled metaphor!).

In related infrastructure news, Atrios writes:

A bunch of other infrastructure projects are probably good ideas on the merits, could use some federal money, but are unlikely to really be able to get off the ground fast enough to really be a quality short run stimulus. But there’s another category of stuff, low level things like street and sidewalk repair, demolition of abandoned buildings, etc… that there’s pretty much an infinite demand for.

Indeed. We can’t start handing out hammers next month and get to work on East Link (or 520, for that matter), but we can certainly get to work on Seattle’s embarrassing lack of sidewalks, for example. The quickest way to make this a “walkable” city is to ensure there’s a proper sidewalk to walk on.