Comments on: Sarah Palin, Transit Advocate?

By: Doc Barnett

Doc Barnett — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 00:16:10 +0000

Frommer’s description of Wasilla is accurate. Its residents (including some of my family) live there to get away from all the big-city problems of multicultural Anchorage. No, seriously. And then they try to figure out how shorten driving times around the gigantic natural feature (Cook Inlet) they have decided to put between themselves and their jobs (if any):

http://www.aktransportation.org/mega-projects/the-knik-arm-bridge-mega-project

By: Larry Littlefield

Larry Littlefield — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:49:21 +0000

The important point here is that state and (particularly) local officials in every kind of place and of every ideology (including the most unlikely) want transit, particularly rail transit, and other place-making investments.

That’s what’s behind the light rail boom: not transportation cost-benefit, not the environment, place-making. That’s also what’s behind all the suburbs trying to re-create themselves with mixed-use “downtowns.” No one wants to be no place, even right wingers in Alaska.

All the more reason for those in favor of place making to be wary of more infrastructure resources being allocated at the federal level.

By: Fair Trade

Fair Trade — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:11:41 +0000

I don’t trust her and I don’t believe she supported bus and rail for anything other than pork barrel politics.

By: Brad Aaron

Brad Aaron — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:10:37 +0000

That’s interesting, Shemp. I read somewhere that she was skeptical of the war — or at least the way it’s being run — as her son is about to be deployed.

Good point, Susan. At least they weren’t road projects (?).

There’s also this from the Wasilla Wikipedia entry:

Charles Wohlforth, in a Frommer’s travel guidebook on Alaska, described Wasilla as “the worst kind of suburban sprawl of highway-fronting shopping malls and gravel lots.”

By: Susan Donovan

Susan Donovan — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:44:42 +0000

I just have a feeling that this was more about lining contractors pockets than building good public infrastructure. But show me some transit oriented development in Wasilla and I will have one thing that I don’t hate about this women.

ONE thing.

By: Shemp

Shemp — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:41:24 +0000

Actually, material in today’s Times is more enlightening than Grist’s bullet points.

From the lead editorial:

” In a speech last June to her former church in Wasilla, Ms. Palin said the war in Iraq was ‘a task that is from God.’ “

“In her speech to the Wasilla Assembly of God in June, Ms. Palin said it was ‘God’s will’ that the federal government contribute to a $30 billion gas pipeline she wants built in Alaska.”

By: Shemp

Shemp — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:31:39 +0000

Book-burning, anti-choice, global-warming-denying fundamentalist.

I wonder how that Wasilla-Girdwood travel market is coming along?