One of my former bosses doesn’t like County Exec Ron Sims’s plan to stick more Metro buses on the streets, without expanding rail transit beyond Sound Transit’s already-under-construction single route.

The ex-boss has one salient point: Buses have a deserved rep for being infrequent and bogged down by car traffic, and an undeserved (in my opinion, not my ex-boss’s) rep for uncleanliness and discomfort. (Sound Transit’s suburban commuter coaches are particularly plush these days.)

But he’s wrong about calling buses “the public transportation option favored by people who do not take public transportation.” There’s nothing the local political caste likes more than a big construction project, such as light rail or the Lake Union streetcar.

But political turf-staking’s also at stake here. Metro’s now a county agency. Sound Transit is a tri-county joint venture. The already-missed Seattle Monorail Project was an independent agency which no politician controlled (and most every politician wanted to kill from the start).

Sims is proposing a transit scheme that could be created and maintained within the current county bureaucracy and taxing authority, rather than those of Sound Transit.