Steven DenBeste says, over at Redstate, “They know what’s best for you.”

A long time ago, in a land far far away called “San Francisco”, there was a real problem with rush hour traffic, especially from East Bay. Anyone who lived in Richmond, or Oakland, or Sausalito, had a choice of one bridge to reach their job in San Francisco: the Oakland Bay Bridge. Traffic trying to feed that bridge was stop-and-go every day and commute times were getting longer and longer.

Someone came up with the idea of creating a light rail system, which eventually became known as BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. It wasn’t going to be cheap, though, especially since it was going to be high tech. But the voters in the Bay Area all voted for it enthusiastically even though the price was going to be high.

Change the name to MetroRail and “enthusiastically” to “barely” and you’ve got Houston….

Eventually they got it all working. . . . And for the next few months the trains ran mostly empty, right past the clogged highways BART was supposed to help.

Someone finally went out and did another survey of voters in the Bay Area to ask them why they had originally favored building BART, at colossal expense. It turns out that the most common answer was, “So that other people will ride it, and get off the freeways, so that I’ll have an easier drive to work.”

Lotta that going around. In a recent column for CBS news, Dick Meyer writes about the attitude he describes as “We know what’s best for you”. It’s hardly new, though. YOU need to ride BART; that’s why we built it.

And Metro says, “YOU need to ride Metro Rail, that’s why we build it.” But this sounds like Metro too:

Originally it was intended that the entire system be computerized. There weren’t going to be any drivers on the trains. After all the tracks were built, they spent some time running empty trains around on it to make sure it worked. Then they had a serious collision.

It turned out that the system was designed so that the computer detected the presence of a train on a given segment by the fact that it was drawing power. But one of the trains suffered a failure and shut itself down, which means it stopped drawing power, and it vanished as far as the computer was concerned. It sent another train through that segment, with about the results you’d expect. Fotunately there wasn’t anyone on board either train.

The only thing they were missing was malfunctioning red lights….