MTA Suspends Rail Projects

Re “MTA to Suspend Work on Three Key Rail Lines.’ Jan. 15:

What a mess! The MTA debacle over our imperiled subway lines is a case lesson in mismanagement and political aggrandizement--and every breathing taxpayer in Los Angeles County has been paying dearly for this folly since the early 1980s. Imagine how the lives of our public-transportation-taking citizens could have been improved had even a fraction of those funds been put instead toward improving bus service. It surely wouldn’t have cost anything like the $300 million per mile that the subway lunacy requires.

And what do we have to show for the hundreds of millions already wasted? Now attorneys from downtown can take a subway to eat lunch at Langer’s deli. Thanks MTAmembers. We won’t forget you at election time.

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It would be interesting to know how many miles of subway could have been built with the money spent on building the 26-story Taj Mahal headquarters.

JOHN ALLEN

Pacific Palisades

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After reading The Times Jan. 15 and noting the stories about the MTA and the MWD, I conclude that Scott Adams’ “Dilbert� continues to correctly assess the behavior of many senior managers.

While it was described rigorously as far back as 1977 in Irving L. Janis and Leon Mann’s book, “Decision Making� (Free Press), in which they used the name “groupthink� to describe a behavior that internally reinforced group views while ignoring outside information, Dilbert’s oft-used adjective, “clueless,� is emotionally much more satisfying.

SAM BRUNSTEIN

Glendale