It was straight out of the movies.

Tough, purposeful mayor strides to the podium and delivers his Big Decision. His lines are perfect. It was really kind of bizarre.

I'm not in the habit of heaping praise on Greg Nickels. But he really had a fine moment last week.

In the mayor's announcement of the city's withdrawal of permits for the monorail, there really wasn't anything Nickels didn't say. He laid it out clearly; Nickels' statement covered the range of reasons we've come to be all too familiar with for spiking this ill-fated project. He hit just the right tone -- sadness that a good idea should come to this, but firmness that in the interest of city taxpayers this reckless project should not be allowed to proceed.

Nickels didn't have to do any of this. He could have let the monorail board deal with it, or the city council, or (most likely) the state legislature. It was a fine example of leadership, of stepping up to the plate and making a tough decision.

Like I said, I'm not used to this heaping of praise on Nickels. But he earned it.

Once the city council followed suit and withdrew its support, the monorail board had no choice but to put a measure on the November ballot. Amazingly, they didn't even have a contingent for this; their ballot proposal for a shorter, 10 mile route comes without estimates of savings in cost or length of taxation, because they hadn't prepared it. This is what happens when oversight of a massive public works project is left to the True Believers.

Mercifully, it will be a short campaign; after five ballot measures, we all know all the arguments by now. Maybe, just maybe, SMP can come up with a plan between now and November that will convince voters that it is a viable project, that it has the revenue to build the project without indebting Seattle taxpayers for 50 years to come, that it hasn't hopelessly whittled down the project's features to the point where safety and rider convenience are fatally compromised. Maybe.

But I doubt it. That's exactly the sort of wishful thinking that got SMP into trouble to begin with.

At this point, sadly, there is no future for this project. Seattle needs to start over, to take the money and the energy that would have gone into the monorail and divert it into some other plan for loosening gridlock. The transportation projects that most need Seattle taxpayer dollars aren't as exciting or sexy as the monorail was, but they're more essential: a replacement for the Alaskan Way viaduct; a new 520 bridge; the repaving of I-5 throughout Seattle. With federal dollars drying up in the next few years, and with the gas tax increase likely to be repealed by statewide voters in November, chances are that if we want these essential projects to happen, we're going to have to pay for them ourselves. Forget, for the time being, light rail expansion; the money just doesn't exist for it.

The Alaskan Way viaduct will be Nickels' next great challenge. With the state money via the gas tax likely to disappear, he still doesn't have most of the financing in place for his preferred, pricey tunnel. Nickels may just have to realize that the money for an expensive tunnel option just isn't available. But Nickels is right to prioritize the viaduct; we're one medium-sized earthquake away from losing it entirely.

Meanwhile, there will be plenty of time for dissecting what went wrong with the monorail. Ultimately, it was a victim of its own populism. A transit system that needed analysis in the cold light of day was instead saddled with True Believers that took offense every time someone tried to point out that the numbers simply didn't add up. It wasn't just that Joel Horn and Tom Weeks bamboozled everybody. The monorail faithful simply didn't want to hear skeptics.

A year ago, when a recall measure made the fall ballot, all the arguments were out there. At that moment, there was still plenty of time to correct course, to make the process more transparent and accountable and to make the numbers make sense. It could have been changed, it could have been saved.

Now, it's too late. And as SMP continues to burn through money to try to save itself, voters, I think, are likely to do the right thing in November.

Just like Greg Nickels did last week.