Nigel Tufnel: The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and…
Marty DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten?
Nigel Tufnel: Exactly.
Marty DiBergi: Does that mean it’s louder? Is it any louder?
Nigel Tufnel: Well, it’s one louder, isn’t it? It’s not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You’re on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you’re on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?
Marty DiBergi: I don’t know.
Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Marty DiBergi: Put it up to eleven.
Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.
Marty DiBergi: Why don’t you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?
Nigel Tufnel: [pause] These go to eleven.
The MTC and CATS are now a comedy team. That’s the most that can be said for actually proposing to spend one billion dollars for no good reason.
A $1.1 billion train to 485 would’ve at least reached a 2000-space park-and-ride lot — getting cars off the roads supposedly being a rationale for the train, remember? But stopping short at UNCC — and building no parking there for the station — does not do that.
Why run a train to UNCC? Because that’s where the students are. Why would the students ride the train to Uptown? Because we built the $45m. Jim Black Building in Uptown. Why didn’t we build the Jim Black Building across campus and let students walk to it? Because we needed to build a train.
Ta-da. Or possibly yadda-yadda-yadda. It makes your head hurt. Mecklenburg’s scarce transit and transportation dollars being soaked up by a scheme to get college students quickly and easily to Whisky River to get drunk. Maybe we should see if Bud Light or lazyday.com can be an underwriting sponsor of the project.
Oh, and the city of Charlotte along with the state will have to throw $45m. in non-half cent tax revenue at fixing up North Tryon Street for the trains. Money that could instead be spent on any other transportation need — sucked into the Nigel Tufnel-Lazyday.com line, brought to you by Bud Light.
Any member of the MTC who votes for this madness should be stuck in a rubber-room.
Bonus Chuckle: The stenographers at the UPoR actually bring up traffic congestion among their arguments for a billion-dollar train without interstate commuter lots. The whole world is crazy.
