Manuel Medina looked like he could barely believe the words were coming out of his mouth.

Only two years ago, the Bexar County Democratic Party chairman, who is currently running for mayor, produced a TV ad that described tea party Republicans as “radical terrorists.”

A week ago, however, Medina was singing a different tune. He told a mayoral-forum audience, at Morningside Ministries at the Meadows, that “we ought to thank the tea party” for shooting down this city’s downtown streetcar project in 2014. Medina argued that the streetcar was a special-interest boondoggle that would have done nothing to alleviate traffic congestion in San Antonio.

Of course, Medina’s alliance with the tea party on transportation is about as durable as a Port Aransas sand castle. Unlike local conservatives, he hated the streetcar because its ambitions were not grandiose enough. He not only wants to see a passenger rail line connecting San Antonio to Austin (a goal the city recently pursued with the defunct Lone Star Rail project), but high-speed rail connecting this city to Monterrey, Mexico.

While the devilish details of such a plan have yet to be explained by Medina, the introduction of such big-ticket ideas has brought high-speed rail into the mayoral conversation.

At the candidates forum, District 8 Councilman and mayoral hopeful Ron Nirenberg shot down Medina’s inaccurate statement that San Antonio “took our bag of money” and abandoned Lone Star Rail, when in fact the project was doomed by Union Pacific’s announcement last February that it would not transform its freight-track line into commuter rail.

Nirenberg countered that Lone Star Rail disbanded because “it was politically and financially ineffectual,” and said the city needs to concentrate on pushing the governor’s office — through the Alamo Area Metropolitan Planning Organization — to make a San Antonio-Austin connector a transportation priority.

Mayor Ivy Taylor has endorsed the idea of a San Antonio-Austin rail line, suggesting that it could be delivered by the private sector.

Nirenberg also talked about the need “to complete the Texas triangle,” to get San Antonio and Austin in on a Dallas-to-Houston bullet-train venture that President Donald Trump’s administration has identified as one of 50 infrastructure projects it supports.

These are big, transformative ideas, but a quick history lesson reminds us that they’re fraught with pitfalls.

Longtime San Antonians surely remember (and wince at the mention of) the Texas High Speed Rail project, which galvanized and paralyzed the transportation conversation in this community from 1989 to 1995.

That $8.4 billion project attempted to connect the big cities that make up the Texas triangle with a 200-mph bullet train. Its proponents promised that it would carry more than 14 million riders a year.

The project bogged down, however, when Texas TGV Corp., the French-American consortium that was awarded the franchise, flaked out on its commitment to raise $170 million in equity financing.

Ultimately, it died a quiet, anticlimactic death, much like the streetcar and Lone Star Rail. It has taken more than two decades for the Texas triangle concept to fully recover from the fallout of that failure.

The lesson of Texas High Speed Rail is one we should keep in mind during this mayoral race: Ambitious transportation ideas are fun to talk about, but when they are poorly conceived or structurally flawed, their expensive demise can set back the cause for a generation.

That’s the Ticket

I was amused by the Ticket Sports Pub’s response last week to the public backlash over the “Trump shots” it advertised (to protesting “Dems & celebs”) on its marquee.

“If you look at previous marquees, you will see that we don’t stand on either side of issues,” the downtown bar stated.

Funny, but I could swear that it was the Ticket that used its marquee in 2010 to denounce the Affordable Care Act by proclaiming, “Obama/Congress we don’t want your awful health care bill.”

There was also the time the Ticket blasted disgruntled Wisconsin public employees with this message: “How about taxpayer pensions paid by unions?”

Ticket co-owner Todd Koym also used the bar’s marquee to offer support for Herman Cain’s 2012 candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination.

Nothing wrong with expressing your political views, of course, but the Ticket definitely has a history of standing on one “side of issues.”

ggarcia@express-news.net

Twitter: @gilgamesh470