This editorial will appear in tomorrow's print edition.

At some point, a train has to close the doors and move out of the station. Even if more people want on board.

Sound Transit has reached that point as it prepares to lay commuter-rail tracks from Freighthouse Square through Tacoma’s Dome District and over Pacific Avenue.

Many of the district’s advocates are bitterly opposed to the transit agency’s plan to build a berm to carry the tracks through the neighborhood. They favor a “post-and-beam” design. Unlike the berm, the post-and-beam structure would be open underneath, not an impenetrable earthen wall.

This controversy quickly becomes very arcane.

For example, Sound Transit planners say the path of the sloping berm could be beautified like a parkway – and the post-and-beam alternative could wind up as a gathering place for transients and derelicts.

Opponents counter that the berm would likely become a neglected, weed-ridden eyesore, and a post-and-beam design would lend itself to vibrant commercial development.

The conflicting claims – some based on hypotheticals – are hard to sort out.

But this isn’t merely a local dispute over the future of a few blocks in downtown Tacoma.

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This editorial will appear in Wednesday's print edition.

Safety officials missed a golden opportunity

The federal agency charged with protecting the public’s safety on our nation’s highways has failed in that mission for the past six years – at least when it comes to warning drivers about the danger of using their cell phones while behind the wheel.

Back in 2003, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had research pointing to the significant dangers posed when drivers use cell phones. It estimated that those drivers caused 955 deaths and 240,000 accidents in 2002.

But the NHTSA withheld those findings from the public, and agency officials refused to do a large-scale study of cell phone risks. Why? Because officials at the Department of Transportation didn’t want to antagonize members of Congress who controlled the highway budget.

Keeping legislators happy vs. saving lives. How could “traffic safety” officials get that one so wrong?

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"Bob," below, made this snarky comment (below) on our Tuesday editorial about missing out on federal grants to states that lead in school reforms.

Bob's point (as I understand it) is a good one: How can you fairly use student performance to evaluate teachers when there are such wide disparities in students – some wealthy and well-prepared, some disadvantaged, etc.?

I have always understood that the data would be used to measure what the teacher is doing with his or her own students – i.e., how much did a particular class learn relative to where it started out, not relative to how well students were doing elsewhere.

Am I wrong? If not, I fail to understand the unions' opposition to the use of student performance data.

Anyway, here's Bob, speaking for himself:

Bob (coldone)

"...A state must connect data on student performance to individual teachers. The logic for this is blindingly obvious: The data connection can not only help evaluate teachers, it can help evaluate the curriculum they use, the schools of education that trained them and the effectiveness of their principals..."

Fantastic idea. Finally someone has it right.

We'll collect data on the student performance of a school full of gang bangers to their teachers and also collect data on the student performance of the sons and daughters schools of doctors, lawyers, rocket scientists, etc. to their teachers.

We'll throw it in a database and all the worlds problems will be solved.

Maybe I missed that course in college where they throw apples and oranges in a blender and come up with honey?

Well, Al Gore was right after all.

Global warming is upon us, at least here in the Pacific Northwest, at least here in my kitchen. Personally I thought GW was going to be a more gradual process, a degree every century sort of thing. I didn’t think it would come this fast. Truth be told, I haven’t been this hot since I was twenty-two years old. That was the year I drove from California to Texas in a Toyota Tercel with no air conditioning and only one window that could roll down.

So it’s not as if I have never known heat. I am a former military spouse. I have lived in the South, but in the South there is little that air conditioning doesn’t touch. Those people practically put Freon in their under garments and who can blame them? The same cannot be said of our little corner of the world.

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