Quote:
Originally Posted by Spocket
Called it when it was announced.
It's sort of like how environment Canada gives you the weather forecast in either the summer or the winter. In the summer and you're sweating buckets, they always forecast that by two or three days, it'll rain and cool things off. In the winter when you're experiencing -30 every night, the relief is forecast for a couple days away. Either way, within a couple days, you'll see that the forecast has changed and the relief has been pushed back a couple more days.
It's the exact same thing with Manitoba government spending on highways. If they say "We plan to build x by 20xx" you can rest assured that by the time you reach 20xx, it will have been pushed back to some later date. They've been doing this since the Perimeter was built and nothing has changed. When we get to whatever date they've set now, we'll be told that shovels will be in the ground ten years from that date. Repeat ad nauseum.
Look at rapid transit, for example. I heard them debating it for decades. Every few years they'd announce another study. Some people here would, rather surprisingly, laud the government for moving the matter forward but the truth was that it's just a stalling tactic. Nothing new with this.
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Or is it that politicians with foresight say "hey, we need to upgrade this piece of infrastructure but before we can do so, we need to study it to get cost estimates" and then the report comes back saying "guess what? That piece of infrastructure you promised is going to cost $X million dollars" and frugal Winnipegger's say "Wow, that's a lot of money and I don't want to pay higher taxes so lets not do it."
And then 4 years later a new set of politicians get voted in and say "hey we need to upgrade this piece of infrastructure but since things have changed so much over the last 4 years we need to update the study for an accurate cost estimate", then the costs come back and low-and-behold the new project will cost 2 times $X million dollars and frugal Winnipeggers will faint at this new cost and complain that it's higher than last time and so nothing will get done. Now repeat that ad nauseum.
You can't just do a study about road upgrades or rapid transit in 1985, abandon the plan, and then return to it in 2005 and say "I guess we'll just adjust all the cost estimates by inflation" and go with that. Winnipeg is changing rapidly, and so the demands and needs of the people change too. Winnipeggers are notoriously cheap and hate paying for public goods (that isn't filling potholes), so we get all sorts of delays and value-engineered public projects that half-ass everything because that's all we are willing to pay. Of course there are other issues besides our cheap preferences, but by and large I'd say that if enough people wanted a big project to get done because they saw the necessity of it (e.g. the Flood way), it could get done. But right now, Winnipeggers are convinced the only thing they need in their life are filled potholes. More efficient roadways and rapid transit aren't much of a priority when owning two cars is the dream and typical rush hour traffic only makes your commute downtown half an hour at most.
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