I appreciate Maria's spirited defense of the Monorail, and I agree with her critiques of all the commonly raised objections. But I'm still doing the same thing I'm doing for each of the transportation-related measures: Eyman's I-776, Referendum 51, and the Monorail. I'm voting no.

Referendum 51 is absurd in too many ways to allow the few necessary pieces--the needed road construction, the support for rural public transit systems--to justify the whole package. It's replete with road projects that use the Sound Transit trick of starting a bit of a big project on the assumption that once partly done, voters will have to approve more money later to finish it. Ref. 51 has idiocies like three-lane expansions at the intersection of I-405 and SR-167 that promptly end after three miles, and a new north-south freeway in Spokane that, when it intersects I-90, will create an 18-lane-wide freeway in downtown Spokane. For a few blocks. In Spokane.

Eyman, similarly, is playing games. His I-776 uses statewide voter anger over car tab fees to blow a hole in the Sound Transit budget, with the expressed purpose of forcing a revote on ST funding. But that's something tri-county voters should be deciding, not the whole state.

And that's my problem with the monorail, as well as these other measures, and the regional transportation plan we'll get to vote on next year, and the probable Sound Transit vote after I-776 passes. It's a half-assed, piecemeal approach to transit planning. The ETC, if the monorail passes, will be the fifth separate agency in the Seattle area overseeing a transportation service. Tracking the permutations for infighting, budget hijinks, and screwing the public is nearly impossible, but even more importantly, it's no way to solve the problem.

The monorail took the West Seattle-Ballard route because Sound Transit got to the I-5 corridor first. I-405 is getting the Ref. 51 money because of Olympia politics involving Eastside Republicans. Sound Transit won't go to the airport; God knows why. And let's not even start on the Alaskan Way viaduct.

All this is a perfect prescription for bleeding money and creating a jumble of technologies and agencies that will be inefficient as well as wasteful. Is this the best we can do? I hope not. But the only way we'll find out is by demanding all of the relevant planners sit down together and come up with a plan. One plan. Meantime, despite the emotional appeal of spitting in officialdom's eye with the monorail, I'm voting no on it, and on every other transportation measure until there's some evidence that these people are talking with each other.