Really?

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

After a parade of anti-rail hit pieces, Crosscut apparently feels like they need to run a pro-rail piece. You can read it here. It does a pretty good job of dispatching the anti-rail pieces that have appeared before.

But get this — the author, William Echols, is Crosscut’s intern. An INTERN! That’s right: after going out into the world and finding anti-rail professionals in the transit community (no easy task, since most transit planners agree that light rail should be part of any urban transit network), the best that David Brewster could do for the “pro” rail piece was to look around the office and say, “how about… you! Yeah, you…. when you get back from fetching us coffee, why don’t you fire up Wikipedia and put together a pro-rail article, eh?”

Look, I have no idea how the Crosscut “newsroom” really works, and for all I know, Brewster doesn’t even drink coffee. I don’t mean to impugn the credentials of Mr. Echols, either. Like I said, he does a fine job. But one can only imagine what kind of an enlightening article we’d get if we had an actual, real-life transportation planner or professor writing a pro-rail piece.

(via CIS, who’s equally astonished that Crosscut even published a pro-rail article)