A lot of people around town pick up Corydon (or St. James or insert other Winnipeg neighbourhood)LIVING. It's a coffee and donuts kind of easy read available in Smitty's , other restaurants, and a lot of businesses all over the city.
As an important part of the alternative media, the ideas and points of view in the stories by Uncle Bob and columns by Marshall Armstrong are thought provoking and entertaining - and often exactly what we hear from you listeners.
This week's installmnet by the publisher had me laughing out loud. Here is Uncle Bob's frank assessment of the attempt by an NDP MLA to influence the city's selection for the to-be-renewed Disraeli Bridge.
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Bridge - the Card Game
“Bridge” (the card game) includes a Dummy.
“Bridge (the Disraeli) attracts a whole bunch of them.
Bridge-building is supposed to be about uniting people – and the nutbars who want a new, improved Disraeli bridge may just be able to do that – uniting the people who pay taxes – in a fist shaking frenzy to save themselves from the poor house.
The existing bridge needs a lot of work. Very expensive work. Just to patch up the existing structure, we are supposedly on the hook for $125 Million.
Sadly, this inspires some people to say things like “What’s a Million?” and begin plotting to tack on an “extra few million.”
So far, the few million extra ranges up to about $160 – but the sky’s the limit. And what would we get for the extra few million?
Would you believe: bicycle paths?
The Disraeli dates from 1960. All the years I’ve driven over it, I have never seen a) a pedestrian, or b) a cyclist. It’s a long hard climb on foot – and challenging on a bike. Isn’t it funny how ugly bridges like the Louise or the Redwood are not only cheaper and last longer but also are simpler to walk or bike across?
Bike paths may be really, really “green” – but dropping another $35 Million in long green to make bike lanes will not, I predict, help us meet our Kyoto goals. Indeed, extra greenhouse gasses from ambulances retrieving stricken cyclists from the twin peaks will only add to our carbon footprint, as will hearses taking the cyclists to their last green spaces.
Last week the tall foreheads in the city planner’s department decided to ask the public whether they would like a low cost $130 million dollar Disraeli Bridge or a fancy $160 million dollar model, or if you are Elmwood NDP MLA Jim Maloway, possibly even a $250 million six lane extravaganza.
It seems the confusing question is whether or not we want to die from poison, strangulation or shooting rather than whether or not we want to die at all.
Nobody but nobody, it seems, ever bothered to ask, “Where is the money
coming from?”
$30,000,000 can buy a lot of very good and very useful things for our city, a lot more than we can list here but just for instance $30,000,000 would almost be the city’s share of the Bomber’s stadium.
What would taxpayers rather have…. a new stadium or a bike path?
In this era of “fee for service “ wouldn’t it at least be prudent to see if potential users are prepared to spend $30 million for bike paths? Nobody should have any objection to spending funds on bridge bike lanes if taxpayer’s pockets weren’t fleeced, and instead, the prospective cyclist users were prepared to subsidize the construction from increased bicycle license fees.
Let’s do the math. City of Winnipeg bike licenses cost $5.35. At the onset I started off, figuring probably a third of ‘Peggers own bikes and a yearly fee increase of $10.00 might be enough over ten years to do the job. Wrong!
Instead of the 33% projection of ‘Peggers only 1% of city residents are civic minded enough to cough up a measly $5.35 to plate their wheels.
Actually city officials have sold no more than 6000 licenses. Probably most of them are granola crunching Wolseley-wegians and those folks would never in their wildest dreams shell out extra for the privilege of peddling up Henderson Highway in any event.
But I digress. Wouldn’t the $30 million cost recalculated now by sharing with only 6000 people be about $500 per year over ten years? Wrong again.
The license is not paid annually, it is a one-time charge. That lifetime license calculation raises the potential new fee increase to $5000 per cyclist…a tough sell even on the best of days. Maybe Jenny (greener than thou) Gerbasi would pay but 99.99% would not.
By the way the current fee of $5.35 does not even cover the cost of the full time city employee scooping up junk peddle toys from the streets.
Mr. Multi-million Maloway might want to stick the similar $100 million tab for bus lanes in his pipe and smoke it for a while too. Would Dancing Gabe or any of the typical 1000 passengers a day cough up a fee increase on this route alone of ….say $10 grand each a year for a few seconds faster on the overpass?
Of course they wouldn’t any more than the cyclists would, but it is perfectly OK to spend money as long as it comes out of someone else’s pocket. Thats the fundamental flaw in allowing planners, who do not pay the bills, to steer the agenda.
To save the Maloway big bucks maybe newly hired Planning Property and Development guru and Katz buddy Phil Sheegl would be better used every morning as flag man to keep the buses moving rather than spend $100 mil on new lanes.
And a PS: Don’t get started on the “benefits” to all the local businesses that will be driven to the brink, by the brilliant plan to close the Disraeli for 16 months.
Maybe we should just open an industrial strength, car carrying, Splash and Dash for those who really, really need to cross underneath the construction. Heck a few mil should do that!
And don’t ask the 40,000 drivers who cross the Disraeli daily, how they
feel about single-filing it over the ancient Redwood and Louise Bridges.
Bridges, for some reason, must be particularly attractive to planning
dummies.
Remember the brand new but broken South Perimeter bridge?
How about the over budget Main Norwood fiasco?
How about the million dollar toilet on the Provencher Bridge
and who could ever forget the bridge to nowhere north of Selkirk.
What a pity …. All these planning dummies who want to play, and only one bridge at a time.
Uncle Bob
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http://autobahn.mb.ca
