We’ve written again and again about the unbridled, persistent stupidity of this idea to install a passenger rail line between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars with virtually zero possibility that it would ever generate a return on investment. The idea currently lies dormant, thanks to Gov. Jeff Landry having given it a thumbs-down after his inauguration in January of last year, but it’s only an election away from moving forward again.

What we’re hoping is that one effect of that horrific murder on a light rail train in Charlotte last month, and the groundswell of public disgust the video of deranged monster DeCarlos Brown slaughtering Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, and the utter indifference of the others on the train to her as she bled out from her wounds, will finish off thoughts of building that passenger rail line once and for all.

One basic fact that can’t be put aside is that New Orleans and Baton Rouge are both far more dangerous cities than Charlotte is. Baton Rouge’s murder rate of 38 murders per 100,000 residents and New Orleans’ murder rate of 34.7 utterly dwarf Charlotte’s paltry 11.8, and yet the Zarutska murder shows that Charlotte’s light rail is anything but safe.

In the aftermath of that horrific slaughter, local media in Charlotte is taking a hard look at what they’ve built, and it isn’t great…

The debate is expected to intensify in the Charlotte metro, where voters later this year will decide on a one-cent sales tax hike to fund a $25 billion light rail expansion and other transit projects.

WBT Radio news director Mark Garrison rode the light rail Sunday and reported that security was absent and tickets were unchecked for nearly 75% of his trip, highlighting the way homeless individuals take advantage of CATS’ weak enforcement.

“It was interesting to see that when they did check tickets at the train door….several people would not even attempt to get on. That’s because so many people have been accustomed to a free ride. Many homeless have ridden the train, some for hours at a time, never paying the fare,” Garrison told Carolina Journal. “The plan from CATS is to have 219 officers. They are 35 short and last week told city council that they’re having trouble finding people who want the job.”

Garrison acknowledged there were times when riding the light rail left him feeling uneasy.

“Riding the train, I felt a bit edgy. Especially when we passed stops in rougher areas of town, and the train platform had an assortment of homeless pan handlers. No security effort to move them away from the train,” said Garrison. “On a personal note, my grandson loves trains. He and I used to ride light rail for fun every now and then. At this point, I’d be reluctant to take him on it until security is improved.”

And that’s in a city with a murder rate of about a third of what we have in South Louisiana’s two largest cities. The homeless and drug-addicted, not to mention gang members and street criminals, of New Orleans and Baton Rouge are a hell of a lot more prevalent, not to mention uncontrollably violent, here than there.

And they’ve wasted more than $3 billion on a light rail system which is a haven for the scum of the earth, such that when a naive girl fresh out of an Eastern European war zone and propagandized by globalist liberal lies – Zarutska had a Black Lives Matter poster on the wall of her bedroom in a picture of her posted on her social media – thought the train was safe enough to ride at night, she was shortly set upon and slaughtered by a maniac who walked away shouting “I got that white girl! I got that white girl!”

And none of the passengers on that train car lifted a finger to help her until more than a minute later when white people entered the car.

That’s in Charlotte. What do you think it would look like in Baton Rouge and New Orleans?

DeCarlos Brown had been arrested 14 times. He’s a career criminal. The utterly corrupt and predatory criminal justice system in Charlotte, where DEI consultants who aren’t even lawyers can become judges – yes, Brown’s last arrest, for assault, yielded him cashless bail from Teresa Stokes, a magistrate judge with a law degree from something called Cooley Law School but hasn’t passed the bar exam – refuses to incarcerate him.

Some 80 percent of the magistrates in North Carolina aren’t lawyers and they’re handling criminals like Brown. That’s a pretty bad system.

Does anybody think it’s better here?

We’ve got the same revolving-door criminal justice system they’ve got in North Carolina, and our supposed “real” judges in Baton Rouge and New Orleans are as bad or worse as theirs with letting monsters free after horrific crimes. We just had a case in Baton Rouge this week where a lowlife who’d been arrested a half-dozen or so times before was just picked up for raping a four-year-old and giving the poor girl an STD.

Sure, we incarcerate more than North Carolina does. Because we have a lot more criminals. Including a gang problem in both cities which is exponentially worse than anything Charlotte could even dream about, and which has gone almost completely unchecked until the last year or so when efforts have finally been made to clean things up.

Do you think the gangs wouldn’t find the precious choo-choo train from Baton Rouge to New Orleans?

Public transportation is a magnet for crime. And the same leftist rotters who spring the crooks time and again also make sure decent people aren’t allowed to provide the regulation that they won’t. Just look at the Daniel Penny case in New York, which gives you a damn good insight into why nobody in Charlotte intervened to help Iryna Zarutska.

Or at least an additional insight. We’ve got a pretty good idea why she was left alone by those people, and it isn’t because of Penny’s ordeal. But if any of them were willing to help a white girl, they’d know that tackling Brown before he could finish Iryna off would put them at risk of prosecution.

So we know exactly what would happen when that stupid rail line would open between crime-infested downtown New Orleans and crime-infested downtown Baton Rouge.

People would jump the turnstiles in both places and ride the train for free.

The homeless would turn the train into a shelter and ride it back and forth while aggressively panhandling the paying riders.

The authority running the rail line would claim it doesn’t have enough funding for proper security.

There would be robberies, drug overdoses, filth everywhere, and eventually assaults, batteries, rapes and murders on that rail line.

Naturally, ridership would go to nearly zero almost immediately after the line opened and the scum of the earth took it over.

Why? Because people who aren’t the scum of the earth in both places have their own cars and will surely opt to drive them. The population in Baton Rouge and New Orleans isn’t very dense at all, so while we certainly complain about traffic on our poorly-developed road system it’s nothing like it is in Charlotte.

The argument on the stupid passenger rail idea here has already been made. Now it needs to be finished off. We need less public transportation in southeast Louisiana, not more.