Adumbration

To be clear, I appreciate the desirability to replace the SR-99 viaduct through Seattle.  I used to drive that route every day, and more than once considered the prospects of an earthquake flattening me and my little car.  A tunnel may very well have been the most cost effective and efficient solution. 

But it is naive to expect such projects work perfectly  - last month they finally determined that the obstacle blocking Bertha for the preceding weeks was a steel pipe left in the path by a prior survey crew of the same organization.   Complex development projects are not limited to just a single issue that crops up which no one could foresee.

In the latest installment, one of the things we might recall about this situation is that when a private entity faces some setback, or the need to recover from some blunder, the rest of us can watch from the sidelines with bemusement or intellectual curiosity. 

On the other hand, when the people in governments take on such projects, the waste of time and resources becomes a personal affront to everyone those people claim to represent.

It's easy in such situations to engage in recrimination - they should have done this, or that, or the other thing, instead of what they did end up doing that led to the current disaster.  But those are only symptoms. Symptoms of a mindset that believes that a common good can be achieved by giving a small group of people tremendous power to impose on everyone else one particular answer to that common good.