Back in the early 1960s, some of the delay in building the Interstate highway system was it could cost as much as a $million a mile to build!
Today, the $64 million, 2 mile extension to South Lakeshore Drive opened through the former US Steel South Chicago works site. It’s not an interstate, just a boulevard with bike paths, pedestrian crossing lights, traffic sensitive signals that use LEDs that are green, and crabapple trees.
Now that the street has been built, redevelopment of the US Steel property can begin, with high rise residential buildings where you’ll have a greAt view of Gary Indiana and the former Calumet landfill.
The US Steel South Chicago works employed 20,000 people at its peak. With the creation of the EPA, its days were numbered. The facility finally closed for good in 1992. The prosperity it brought to the South Side as an employer of recent immigrants was replaced by the abandoned neighborhoods, government dependency and violent drug gangs. Now that’s pretty progressive.
http://www.suntimes.com/photos/galleries/index.html?story=23368736
Get the “warm” color white LED lights, they don’t attract insects the way other lights do! Great for garage door opener lighting.
This article says it is being touted as the Obama presidential library site: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-10-14/news/ct-met-getting-around-1014-20131014_1_south-lake-shore-drive-extension-opening-iron-ore/2
I noticed that. How does one make a library from Blackberry text messages?
Must read on Illinois: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-28/reagan-revolution-misses-tax-fiefdoms-flourishing-in-u-s-.html
The nightmare (for us) begins when those 38,266 special purpose districts along with all the cities, towns and states, not to mention the Regime, attempt to raise enough tax revenue to pay for ridiculously expensive public employee pension plans, social security and health care benefits from 42 million producers, of which 50% are part-time workers. Plus think about all those unemployed young people who can not even find a decent job now. Of course that does presume that the majority even want to work.
a couple well placed round-abouts and the stoplight gravy train is in trouble. Only thing is most of the American drivers don’t know who has the right-of-way at a intersection.
Most have to be told when to go. ‘sheep’
parrot
While I do not agree with everything Webster Tarpley writes he did write a well researched book in 1996 that could probably be credited with creating the term, “low information voter”, although he doesn’t actually use that term.
Excerpt
” Today’s American population operates according to axioms which are false, oligarchical – and suicidal. A dictatorship or a monarchy can get by with slaves or subjects, but a republic demands educated and capable citizens. Without citizens, a republic cannot survive. The most dangerous force in American life today is public opinion itself. In today’s crisis, public opinion rejects out of hand all the urgent measures needed to promote national survival. This public opinion is stupefied by television and spectator sports and crassly manipulated by the news media. This depraved public opinion reflects not so much the admitted failure of political leadership as the degradation of the intellectual life of the average citizen.”
http://tarpley.net/online-books/against-oligarchy/
One barometer of this is how “public opinion” can shift 30% overnight on very fundamental questions. Most people appear to believe the last thing that they heard.
I believe that. 😉
In addition to the high cost of construction for the interstate system would be the high cost of maintenance, and even more expensive is having to redesign so much of it.
Oh, how soon will the Republicans rev up the need for comprehensive immigration? America needs all those low information voters in order to keep the mentally ill criminal class in power.
I didn’t bring up the Interstate highway system as a waste of money – it was to contrast how much this project has become overloaded with “extras” that pushed up the cost. The pedestrian crosswalks are the most preposterous, at least for now. There is nothing on the East side of the road that anyone would be walking to, if anyone even lived in the area.
I’ve driven through this area a number of times around 1990 – the neighborhood was pretty desolate, but I didn’t feel particularly unsafe. One measure I use (not just in Chicago) is whether a street is on a bus route. Buses have a radio and come by regularly – even if the police aren’t watching, the bus drivers are. Since they have to drive through the area, they have a personal self interest in seeing the troublemakers go back away from the main streets.
OK, and most road construction projects include some sort of kickback to public officials, and not just in Chicago, right?