... and DC has officially lost it.

A day of Trashiness and Trolleys.

This morning, I checked out the Express Blog Log online, because it's such fantastic reading. Not because I wanted to see if anything from my blog had been published there. Because I really don't care about such petty things. And what should my wondering eyes behold, but the Google Street View picture of a man taking a crap on the sidewalk of H Street, NE.

This picture was making the rounds in blogs yesterday. It's both hilarious and sad at the same time, and certainly is fair game for snarky blogs. But despite the fact that it is very hard to offend my sensibilities, this bothers me.

The Express is, sort of, a newspaper that anyone can read. That is, it's sort of a newspaper, but its audience is pretty much everyone who rides Metro. I don't know if the picture was in the print version. I certainly hope not. But really, does this need to be republished here? While I am all for free speech and posting of disgusting pictures and whatnot, everything has its time and place.

It's not as if the picture itself offends me. I mean, I'm posting it here. But The Express? An official publication of The Washington Post? Has it come to this - the best that a so-called legitimate publication has to offer the city today is a picture of a downtrodden soul shitting on the sidewalk? I'm glad that Express picked up on the issue - and quoted a blog that was offended by the collective laugh that was most people's response to the image. But I really can't believe that they felt the need to publish the picture there.

Next up... we have streetcars! DCist notes that the first three streetcars have arrived from Czechoslovakia, all shiny and new.

That's great! Cool new streetcars!

Wait. Do we have any streetcar lines?

Ummm. No. Okay, so when will we have streetcar lines?

Well, DDOT says that the first revenue service line is scheduled to open in the fall of 2012.

Assuming that the world doesn't actually end in 2012, as is expected, that means it is at minimum three years before any of these streetcars will have a passenger riding in it. And I think we all know how likely it is that this project will be completed on schedule, especially since a lot of the technical details like actually where the tracks are going to go still have to be worked out.

I could get into the actual merits of streetcars vs. busses here, which is highly debatable. But since we are apparently already well down that road, I don't see the point. Instead, though, I think it's quite reasonable to ask why we are buying things that likely cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, years before we need them.

Apparently, someone in DC forgot that there was a recession. I'm not an expert, but don't most people usually wait to buy things until they actually need them? When we can't seem to find the cash to pay teachers in our failing school system, or keep libraries open, or staff our 911 service so people aren't put on hold, why are we buying streetcars that we don't need for at least three years?

I don't know what the service life of a streetcar is, but I expect it's probably about 30 years. That is based on the fact that Metro is now retiring all the original 1000 series cars (you know, the ones that collapse like an accordion in a train crash) about 30 years after they were originally put in service.

So even if it's only 3 years before these cars are used, that's 10% of their expected life. If, more likely, it's five or six years before the first streetcar rolls, that's fully 20% of their life depreciated away.

Oh well. I suppose there are worse things going on around here, like Fenty giving almost $100 million in contracts to his buddies, or Nickels giving $500K in signing bonuses to all the lawyers he hired right after letting go a bunch of lawyers because of budget problems.

So anyway, woo hoo! Streetcars! Yeah! Sigh...