Of course, he and his allies for city council disingenuously refer to them as “trolleys.” The study is for streetcars, not trolleys, which are either the touristy antiquey looking vehicles that are just glorified buses, or the electric buses with overhead wires (but no rails) as we often see in Boston and some other cities. (Nothing necessarily wrong with trolleybuses… better than diesel buses, but they’re still just buses and inadequate if the only mode (not true in Boston, of course) of a transit “system.” To be certain, streetcars will not solve all the problems of our high-fare, low frequency, antiquated, and thoroughly inadequate dieselbus-only MadisonMetro, but streetcars could be at least a tiny but symbolically important start to the full-fledged comprehensive multimodal transit system with light rail and feeder buses that Madison should have started a couple decades ago. And candidates like Allen and Deadman who “rail” ;-) against “trolleys,” using that as a codeword for their anti-transit position should be ashamed for misleading the public. So there!

It’s so much fun to watch local conservatives do their best to disassociate themselves from their political party and from the wages of conservative governance. Mayor Dave labels Ray Allen with the Scarlet R. And Allen complains that calling him a Republican is a negative attack [...]