They always build the stadiums, don't they?
Maybe not. In San Diego they actually put it to a public vote. And the vote lost bigtime, 57 to 43 against.
A few weeks later, the owner announced the San Diego Chargers will become the Los Angeles Chargers in 2017, as a new stadium is being built there for the team.
Good or bad for San Diego in the long run? ...who knows... it certainly isn't going to make LA any better...
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Meanwhile the people in Philly are very happy to see
funding come together for a "cap" over I-95, so the people of the eastern section of the city will have direct access to the waterfront, with a huge public park and grass and drainage and whatnot.
West Philly is still a shithole, but the cap will be glorious for the people who live in $1M townhouses in Society Hill.
PennDOT and its 6,000 structurally deficient bridges will be spending $100M for that cap
And we all say, well hey, if the cap makes Philadelphia into an even greater destination for the next 100 years, because instead of pedestrian bridges over the highway, we have a lovely park over the highway...? Isn't that an amazing investment in our future? More money later?
Mmmmmmmmaybe. But the reason this project gets big traction is because, in the last ten years, smart thinkers have come to the conclusion that highway access to central parts of cities has actually hurt the cities.
Those highways were the big money infrastructure projects 30-50 years ago, promising all the benefits etc. etc. so what happened? Now the big projects are having them be tunnels, or having them have ceilings.
...so couldn't we all just not have the big infrastructure projects 30-50 years ago and save two rounds of this stuff? ...who knows...