DUMBEST OLYMPIC FALLOUT HEADLINE. Milwaukee-Madison rail route still on track despite Olympic vote, in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

High-speed rail proponents had been talking about the need for the line in conjunction with three Olympic cycling events coming to Wisconsin.

"We thought we had a very strong application even without the Olympics," Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz said of the state's federal rail application. "The fundamentals of that route are very strong and the Olympics would have sealed the deal."

Maybe the Mayor gets credit for the Dumbest Transportation Policy Statement. If the fundamentals of the route are strong, a two-week surge in ridership affects nothing. If the fundamentals of the route are weak, a two-week surge in ridership seven years in the future does not strengthen them. Chicago's Metra Rail proposed to meet the surge of Olympic traffic by hiring coaches and locomotives from other commuter authorities, exactly as other commuter authorities have done when they had to plan for an Olympics. (Hey, Rio gets to pick a domestic exhibition sport. Anybody for train-surfing?) The North Shore Line did not build its Skokie Valley Route just to move pilgrims to Mundelein for the 1926 Eucharistic Congress, it hired extra coaches from the Chicago Rapid Transit for the day.

The greater problem facing the Madison extension is the constraint, imposed by the environmental impact statement required of shovel-ready projects, that the service terminate at the Madison airport, along the route to Minnesota that has received a finding of no significant environmental impact, rather than at the foot of Capitol Hill or near the Kohl Center.

The emphasis on sport bicycling strikes me as odd also: the industrial-era cities of Janesville, Beloit, and Rockford might benefit by frequent rail access to the office parks of Madison or Barrington as well as to the Loop, thus providing the hypotenuse to the right triangle formed by the Chicago-Milwaukee-Madison line.