In the dueling Sound Transit op-eds in today’s Times, Nickels emerges the clear and present loser, based on tone alone. The ridiculously out-of-character “comical” approach comes off as patronizing and belligerent. It perfectly embodies all the reasons why I’m so suspicious of light rail’s boosters–it makes no substantive argument about what effect light rail can or will have on traffic or anyone’s real commuting choices, but instead simply offers you two options: take action, move forward, be progressive and (synonymous with all that) spend a jillion dollars on light rail–or be a hopeless old stick-in-the-mud. Sims, by contrast, at least has an argument to make, and a good one, about why we’d be far better off actually investing in the bus system that we have available to us today, and that could be 100 times better than it is and serve so many more people, so much more easily, than light rail will fifty years from now.