Comments on Farm Fresh Meat: ... and DC has officially lost it.

(I'm sorry, I would have sent you a private em...

2009-12-18T20:00:58.598Z

(I'm sorry, I would have sent you a private email, but I couldn't find a contact address)

Hi Jamie -- I just realized that your blog isn'...

2009-12-18T20:00:09.394Z

Hi Jamie -- I just realized that your blog isn't listed in The Washington Post's local blog directory and thought I'd encourage you to sign up. It's free and it's might be a way to drive more traffic to your site. Just go to www.washingtonpost.com/local - below the Today's Headlines section, there's a Web Buzz section, where we post links to interesting posts on local blogs -- in that box you'll see a link to our local blog directory. If you run into any problems, let me know. I'm aratanil@washpost.com -- and I help manage web buzz and the database. Thanks much - happy holidays, Lori

The picture was in the print edition of the expres...

2009-12-17T18:50:45.126Z

The picture was in the print edition of the express.

I can't say I know how much lead time one need...

2009-12-17T16:10:04.463Z

I can't say I know how much lead time one needs to buy a street car, and someone responded to my comment about the matter on dcmud with the point that they were piggybacked on someone else's order so we got a better deal. I will accept that there is probably more to this than it appears.

At the same time, I find it hard to believe that there's a four-year lead time needed to buy a street car. And if what you are saying is true, then we actually paid for these things no less than 7 years before we thought we would need them? That seems pretty unusual to me. I mean, you can buy a jumbo jet with only 2 years' lead time.

And age is definitely an important factor in service life. Technology improves every year. The 1000 series Metro cars, for example, are being retired after 30 years. This isn't just because they have been in service for 30 years, it's because there are many improvements in designs that were built into the successive models.

It's just not logical to buy and pay for something nearly a decade before you need it. The money could have been used for something else in the meantime, or at a minimum, earning interest and held in reserve, if it in fact had to be appropriated then for bureacratic reasons.

Anyway I can accept that it's not as simple as I make it out to be, but I really can't believe that a well-planned project of this scale, involving millions of dollars of investment over many years, would have the money for the street cars spent nearly a decade before they were going to be put in service.

Um, that exploitative photo certainly belongs in t...

2009-12-17T15:59:26.752Z

Um, that exploitative photo certainly belongs in the "DC has lost it category," but not the streetcars. They were actually purchased three or four years ago, before the recession. I suspect they have to be bought in advance, because it takes time to build them. I'm not sure if the District realized how long it would take to get the tracks part of it together. While I'm sure it wasn't planned this way, it may actually end up being advantageous that the city made its capital investments during a boom period.

Finally, service life is no doubt mostly related to usage, so that shouldn't be too much of a concern.