Quote:
Originally Posted by moon
These morons seem pretty set on telling the "ignorant" rednecks of Calgary what they should want and like, whether the media is supporting them or not.
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More like the bridge supporters wonder why an extra $4-5 million spent to get a world-class design is a political hot-point when billions are spent on roads and services out to money-losing far-flung suburbs and no one cares. If people REALLY cared about wasting money, the latter would be the issue and the former nothing more than a footnote.
The idea that a bunch of tax-revenue-negative suburbanites should get to decide whether a project for the inner city should go ahead as planned is entirely ludicrous; if the new paradigm is to be saving the city money, lets end all the interchange improvements right now and let the drivers sit in traffic and ponder all the money being saved. If it came down to this pedestrian bridge, which I will use, and saving 10 minutes off someone's trip to the new Balzac mall, I'm certain I know which one I'd axe if I had to - but I DON'T call for decisions like that, because it's not all about opposing everything that doesn't directly benefit me.
What I see on the anti-bridge crowd are people who are arguing against the bridge as a symbol of what they don't like about government; the perception that it is elitist and uncaring about the opinion of the common person, and that it wastes money on unnecessary frivolities. I might even have some sympathy for this viewpoint if it didn't reek of hypocrisy for the aforementioned reason that so few of them came out to oppose the billions and billions of other capital spending done in the last few years - none of which mattered until someone hired an outsider to design a bridge, and then their narrowmindedness had the opportunity to dress itself up as fiscal responsibility.