Sunday, October 24, 2010

Where do they get this stuff?

Matt Kahn is justifiably upset over a remarkably inept review of his Climatopolis.

The LA Times has chosen to print some amazingly wild material in recent weeks. Today, it's business columnist described GM as having "blood on its hands" for "murdering" the EV-1. The fact that the car was a money loser is beside the point. Perhaps it was just timing. A few years later and bail-outs could have kept the EV-1 rolling forever.

In the same Sunday edition, the paper's architecture critic writes that "The movement for a public, mass-transit served city is resisted by those still tied to a suburban, car-centric city." The author should know that the county's high-water transit year was 1985. Ridership then plummeted as bus service was trimmed to pay for rail. Now, in 2010, we may be edging back to 1985 ridership levels, but we have added millions to the population and have spent billions on rail transit.

It's not only the reviwer of Kahn's book that is in no position to opine. Others in high positions on the same paper are equally uninformed.