Quote:
Originally Posted by ranchlandsselling
Really, that's all the poor little inner city got? One bridge? That's all they wanted and won't ask for anything more? Sheesh.
The dramatics in this thread border on ridiculous!
I highly doubt no one could follow the point Left Wing was making. It wasn't that hard to follow.
Someone originally compared the bridge to an interchange in some so called parasite community and it's been used again and again. So he/she brought up that there was no one on the bridge and probably a ton on said stupid interchange. I find it hard to grasp the 1percentagers on this forum can't follow the point he was making whether it was statistically relevant or a perfect comparable.
It's a pretty thing. It was hardly necessary, I bike and commute to work in the summer and run on those paths probably more than 99% of Calgarians and I hardly think it was warranted, and even if it was, probably didn't need to be 25+ milllion and take that long to build. Am I going to use it, you bet. I'll see what it's like and I'l change up my routine and use it. It's interesting and neat and colourful and you can spit over the side or look for fish like any other bridge in Calgary. Chances are the numb-skulls who are taking pictures on it will back up onto the bike path and get in the way regardless that there's dedicated lanes. People with strollers, dogs, skateboards, children and old folks don't seem to get there's a different walking path and a bike path along a ton of memorial drive so how is this bridge going to be any different? It's not. . . It's not going to amazingly make the bike commute in the morning that much better. It's chilly, you have to peddle. you're only supposed to be going 20 kmph anyway and a big red bridge isn't going to make that much of a difference.
No the suburbs haven't been getting large interchanges at the expense of the poor inner city folks being punished. No the suburbs aren't going without an interchange because the inner city got some luxurious bridge. That's just silly.
But to claim it's a necessity that was needed is just silly too. The debate should be was it a waste of money to build a bridge that's pretty and architecturally exciting? Seems like a waste of money to me but I don't know much about those things. I'm just a troglodyte suburbanite who needed the spell check for "architecturally exciting". My next home will likely be in the SW around Marda Loop or out of the city limits.
For those all excited about the bridge thinking it's a terrible idea I'd say suck it up and move to somewhere more boring and lacking in colour. Perhaps Edmonton. For those inner city latte sipping whatchamacallits probably best to move to Tokyo and live in your high rise super density paradise that you seemingly want to live in... Or Vancouver, they'd probably take you too!
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I don't have a problem with most of your post, save for the bolded parts:
I highly doubt no one could follow the point Left Wing was making. It wasn't that hard to follow.
LeftWing wasn't jumped on because no one understood what he was trying to say, he got jumped on because of two reasons:
1. The angle he was coming from and the illustrations he used were at best tenuous and at worst just as extreme and as much a gross oversimplification of the Peace Bridge vs. [Insert typical and generic "suburban" road interchange, or all such interchanges as a group] is in the first place.
2. After getting nowhere with his poorly-supported analogies, his posts very quickly devolved into trolling tactics of thinly-veiled mocking sarcasm and being purposely obtuse and side-stepping to evoke emotional responses. To be fair, this didn't go without similar retaliation.
Just the same as Left Wing's point should be apparent from today's conversation, so too should the point behind the Peace Bridge vs. interchanges qualitative comparison 90% of the time it's been used in this thread. Most of the time it's been brought up is as a higher-level qualitative comparison involving some of these criteria that have been brought up in discussion:
- Prone to cost overruns
- Generally only practically useful in the day-to-day lives of relatively small group people who live in or visit very small areas of the city.
- Prone to procedural missteps on the part of the City
- Associated with a niche transport mode that has correlation with particular lifestyle choices
Outside of being used to illustrate the above, the basis of the Peace Bridge vs. Interchanges comparison deteriorates rapidly. It is true that some people have been careless in alluding to this comparison in this thread, but I think most would agree that it's ridiculous beyond the boundaries of discussing the above. It's quite apparent that LeftWing was either being purposely obtuse or legitimately didn't understand the intended (and narrow) point of what he ended up trying to refute.
No the suburbs haven't been getting large interchanges at the expense of the poor inner city folks being punished.
I don't like the suburbs vs. inner-city false-dichotomy debate, but any reasonable assumptions made in defining what one means by "inner-city" and "suburbs" (i.e. where the imaginary line is) would make what you just said a falsehood.
This is bordering too much on a sweeping generalization than I'm usually comfortable with, but this, almost to the point of being a rule, has been false for the last 60 years and will be for at least a few more years.