Comment 94309

By seancb (registered) - website | Posted November 06, 2013 at 10:14:02 in reply to Comment 94296

Newsflash: the city is broke. To the tune of 1.2 billion dollars. Can you fathom that amount? http://www.wallstats.com/blog/visualizin...

And by the way 40% of our capital budget is spent on roads.

Also, every year we add over $70,000,000 to our deficit due to road maintenance we can't afford to perform -- we put it off to some future date when I suppose we are supposed to magically have an extra 70 million dollars lying around. But we never have the extra. So the following year we add another 70, then another and so on ... and in 18 years we'll have added another billion dollars to the deficit. To put that in a manpower perspective, that 70 mil is the equivalent of one thousand employees making 70 grand every year. A pretty huge workforce making really good money. And to put that into perspective, the recent "huge news story" of US steel closing the blast furnace is costing 47 jobs - less than 5% of that number.

Given the unsustainable cost of our currently built lane-kilometers I have no patience for drivers whining about a delay in traffic of less than 15 minutes (and in most cases less than 2 or 3 light cycles, totalling under 5 minutes).

I'm a driver too, and I'll gladly accept delays during rush hour because I'm not so selfish that I think I should "steal" an additional $70,000,000 from the taxpayers of this city in order to maintain (and expand) the ridiculously overbuilt road system that's sinking us.

Bottom line: nobody is stealing drivers' time. Each driver is free to make choices about where they live, where they go and how they get there. But drivers who fight to keep and expand our already-overbuilt roads are stealing money from all citizens (taxpayers) - especially those who don't own cars.

BTW, these numbers make me ashamed to own a car in this city.

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