My newsletter today discusses the N&O’s continued advocacy for light rail in Wake County, despite the ever-growing cadres of transportation experts and planners that the idea simply cannot work because the area is too decentralized, too spread out, and not nearly population-dense enough to support expensive light rail.
A snippet:
“The white elephant, according to ancient royal Thai tradition, exemplifies the king’s honor and glory,” wrote Joachim Schliesinger in Elephants in Thailand Vol. 3: White Elephants in Thailand and Neighboring Countries. “A white elephant is a gift fit for a king and for a king to acquire one during his reign will bring prosperity and happiness throughout the kingdom.”
As sacred symbols of divine favor (and whose death symbolized its removal), the elephants were treated like royalty and not made to work as other elephants were.
There is tension, however, between this veneration of the white elephant and how it was regarded by English travel writers. Since at least the early 17th century a “white elephant” has been an English idiom for:
a valuable but burdensome possession of which its owner cannot dispose and whose cost — particularly the expense of caring for it — is out of proportion to its usefulness. In short: “a possession that is useless or troublesome” (Oxford English Dictionary).
How did this come about? As Schliesinger explained,
it derives from the practice of the earlier kings of Siam to give rare, auspicious elephants to ambitious courtiers. So great was the honor and so prestigious the gift, that they would have no choice but to look after the animal. However, the unwilling owner would soon be ruined by the enormous cost of looking after it, with its insatiable demand for bananas and sugar cane.
In short, a white elephant was a sign from above of great prosperity and happiness, but in practical terms its possession resulted the loss of both, such a great and inescapable drain on resources it was.
That summation sounds inordinately like the light rail debate in Wake County.
This week nine different groups of the Wake County Transit Plan Advisory Committee were tasked with drafting a transit plan to meet anticipated growth needs and budget constraints. As transportation writer Bruce Siceloff of The News & Observer reported, “None of the nine groups recommended light rail in their transit plans for Wake County. They said Wake couldn’t afford it.”
The editors, however, remained undaunted:
