If you doubt the ironic powers of the universe, look no further than the Seattle monorail. You see, for those than haven’t been paying attention, Seattle recently passed up its last chance for urban mass transit. We did so in an embarassingly incompetent fashion, with misguided leadership, misinformation and a confused understanding of what the problems and possible solutions were. Even shutting down the project is a sad nightmare. It has been a classic project management disaster.

And as the icing on the cake, the tiny one mile stretch of monorail, the one that’s only here because of the World’s fair in 1962, crashed this week. It will cost several million dollars to repair the trains. And, like the monorail fire last year, makes one wonder what’s next for the little guy.

And to all the armchair urban planners out there, you can see what could have been. For the sake of learning from mistakes, I hope all those architecture and urban planning departments add a healthty dose of political training to their degree programs. Mass transit in Seattle should make for an excellent case study in how a very green city can go very wrong.