As John Dryden offered in “The Spanish Friar” in 1681: “There is a pleasure sure in being mad which none but madmen know.” Witness the gleeful rhapsodists running — and milking — this region’s government-public transportation complex. Pittsburgh’s North Shore Connector involves tunneling under the Allegheny River from Downtown to the North Side. Already redefining the term “wacky,” this boondoggle — the most expensive per-mile mass-transit project in the history of the nation — keeps getting wackier and more expensive. Bids for the twin tunnels came in millions of dollars higher than projected. The closest bid was 24 percent too high. And inflation already has added $10 million to the total project cost, now estimated at about $400 million. Bids out of whack. Inflation on the run. So what does the Port Authority of Allegheny County propose• Why, a longer tunnel on the North Shore side, one that will jack up costs even higher. It’s time to pull the plug; it’s time to explore an above-ground alternative. Never mind that the federal government’s appetite for a $3.4 billion, high-speed magnetic-levitation train between Pittsburgh International Airport and Hempfield Township has dried up — there’s no longer an earmark in the transportation bill for construction money. Local government and private backers are plowing ahead. They’re to review a draft environmental impact statement next week. “Right now there is not construction money, but it doesn’t mean it can’t ever happen,” said Port Authority spokeswoman Judi McNeil. Oh, look! A pig with wings! To date, nearly $20 million has been wasted on a project that long ago flunked any valid cost-benefit analysis. To continue this project would be an obscenity. Maglev’s plug should be pulled as well. In 1886’s “Beyond Good and Evil,” F.W. Nietzsche offered that insanity in individuals is rare. “(B)ut in groups, parties, nations and epochs it is the rule.” Let’s break that crazy rule ’round these parts and restore sanity to how we spend our precious public transit dollars.

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