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Eastside Passenger Railway Would Cost $1 Billion

The new cost estimate for commuter-rail service was higher than some commuter-rail advocates claim, but one of those advocates, Cascadia Center of Discovery Institute representative Tom Jones, said the billion-dollar price tag would still be "quite literally a bargain." "This corridor can be developed for about one-third to one-half of the estimated $1.23 billion," Jones said. "Cascadia continues to believe that the corridor can be built for millions and (in) years, rather than billions and decades." Read More ›

Eastside Rail Cost Estimates Inflated, Cascadia Tells Radio Listeners

On evening drive time Wednesday Nov. 19 and morning drive Thursday Nov. 20, Cascadia Center Director Bruce Agnew was featured in a news segment on a new cost estimate for a proposed 42-mile Eastside commuter rail corridor in metro Puget Sound. Soundbite one can be found here. Soundbite two can be found here.

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Achieving goals. Following the right route to intended business objectives.
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Evidence of a Designer’s Purpose

Most of us find it annoying to be forced into a false dilemma. In a false dilemma, alternatives and gradations of belief are arbitrarily excluded as a technique of manipulation. Accept my version of orthodoxy or you’re a heretic! Jews and Christians employ this argumentative strategy, not least when conversation turns to emotionally charged subjects — like Darwinian evolution. And Read More ›

Feasibility Study’s Eastside Rail Dollar Projections Too High

SEATTLE, WASH. (Nov. 19, 2008) - When the Puget Sound Regional Council and Sound Transit present their draft feasibility findings for commuter rail cost and ridership estimates this morning in Seattle, they might have some persuading to do. The Cascadia Center of Discovery Institute, which has analyzed the Eastside’s BNSF corridor extensively, says the cost estimates in the draft Phase II Feasibility Report are much higher than necessary to make the corridor operational. See Cascadia's full release and interurban commuter rail comparison chart. Read More ›

Eastside Commuter Rail Project Could Cost $1B

This article, published by the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce, quotes Discovery Institute Fellow Bruce Agnew: “What we got out of it was that it is feasible from a ridership perspective,”said Bruce Agnew of the Discovery Institute, a long-time advocate for commuter rail. “If it showed poor ridership there would be no reason to go forward but this is healthy Read More ›

Toll-booth-free Tolling On SR 520 And I-90

The State Route 520 Tolling Implementation Committee’s “November Scenario Evaluation” document (pdf) released last week shows that the most robust regional financing for replacing the dangerously sub-par 520 bridge comes from time-variable tolling starting in 2010 and tolling the parallel I-90 span across Lake Washington, starting in 2010 or 2016. Tolling in this key east-west corridor would be done on Read More ›

Discovery Institute Announces Academic Freedom Day Student Video and Essay Contest

SEATTLE — Discovery Institute is sponsoring a student video and essay contest to commemorate Academic Freedom Day, February 12, 2009, on Charles Darwin’s bicentennial. Darwin once wrote, “A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.” That famous quote will be the touchstone for students to communicate Read More ›

What It Means to Be Human

Discovery senior fellow Wesley J. Smith has returned to podcasting with What It Means to Be Human, a podcast about the many policies and proposals in bioethics, bioscience, and animal liberation that threaten the idea of human exceptionalism and undermine universal human rights: On this episode of What It Means to Be Human, Wesley J. Smith, senior fellow in Human Read More ›