Rather than taking BART from the Fruitvale station to the Oakland Coliseum station, which is the next southbound stop on the Fremont Line, LaHood was driven by staff in a black Cadillac Escalade sport utility vehicle.Not cool dude. Perhaps he had enough money before fare hikes went into effect.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Just Hop On Already
Is it really so hard to just hop on?
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10 comments:
It's called government officials. They think they're too good for public transport, conservative or liberal.
The security personnel who are assigned to protect them could easily manage to do that on BART.
They just don't want to deal with anything outside their comfort zone.
If you had a bullet proof SUV to ride around in you'd want to use it too. Not that the Secretary of Transportation is a huge target.
effect, not affect
Thanks for the spellcheck
When a public figure rides public transit, it sends shivers up the spines of the oil, auto, and sprawl profiteers. If the Transport Secretary did it, he would suddenly be discovered to have something wrong with him. Look what they did to Blagojevich in Illinois for giving seniors free transit.
Secret Service protocol doesn't allow a Cabinet Member to just up and do something like that, and the necessary security protocols to ensure that the train was safe for him to ride would have likely negatively impacted the system for quite a bit. All in order to avoid a manufactured gaffe/have a photo-op that wouldn't even make the 5 o'clock news.
Secretary Chu isn't allowed to ride the Metro to and from DOE, even though he would prefer it, due to similar security concerns which trump what government officials think.
I've seen a few motorcades for high US government officials in person, and many more on TV. I know why they're necessary in the world of today, but they still remind me of stories I read back in the 50's of Josef Stalin and other high-ranking members of the Soviet regime being spirited through Moscow in black limos (that were Russian knockoffs of Packards.) No wonder our "elite" have trouble relating to the problems of "normal people".
Bob Davis: Many officials, even as high as cabinet secretaries COULD walk or ride transit easily w/ just a bodyguard, even varying their routes and times each day to "foil" the "Bogie Men". The power and glory of their office come easily to them, for the most part, because few of them have ever had a real work experience in their lives. The majority of them wouldn't know "normal" if they fell over it.
Oh, it's probably "security". Frankly the security staff are uncomfortable if the person they're escorting isn't fully enclosed in steel and bulletproof glass as much of the time as possible.
They're probably right-wing anti-transit nuts too. :-(
Seriously they should just get used to protecting people on foot -- which is all you need to do to protect someone on a train.
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