Exactly - and his point could be made elsewhere. Why should we spend 500k on a player when we could donate to meals? Silly point, but principle is the same, especially with outside funding
Tub of butter £5 (gone in no time), Gallon of Diesel £9ish (gone as quick as you put it in), Pint of beer in Spiral City £5.50 (pi$$ed up wall), Shiny new bridge for public use (lasts for years) £10mill bargain.
You'll always have folk moaning that things need doing, they'll moan whilst it's being done & guess what? They'll still be moaning once it's done.
It's not a case of that. The bridge in use ATM is fine. When it was erected who gave permission for it to be erected? Who then decided it couldn't be open on match days? Who said it would be closed for 3 seasons at least? Who delayed it's announcement that made it cost c£10 mill? Who sanctioned its use is OK through the week but not match days? It's farcical to say the least. My own Mum hasn't been to a match in 3 years because she doesn't fancy the walk around due to her walking issues.
I’m under the impression that the regulation order to close the crossing and the public right of way means there’s no legal requirement to provide any form of access over the previous level crossing. The temporary bridge was never intended to be in use for this amount of time but, you know, quite a bit has happened since it was erected. Let’s take a look at some of the reasons: 1. Covid 2. Subsequent lockdowns as a result of Covid. 3. Delays to essential preparatory work required before the bridge construction due to ….Covid. 4. The initial bridge contractor going into administration and subsequent renegotiations with the new contractor. 5. The requirement to release additional funds to construct the bridge - mostly due to Covid and a rise in materials due to Covid, Brexit, and the war in Ukraine. 6. Covid If only Houghton had used that bloody crystal ball….
Gi ower if you walk over that bridge a dozen times surely you cannot say it’s fine ? I’ll go other way if the new bridge gets delayed that will get shut as it will be unsafe.
Its a very wide bridge and they’ve modelled a number of pedestrian demand scenarios, one of those being a full capacity Oakwell. Only one thing to note from this is a caveat suggesting there may be a requirement to limit the number of people using the steps to access the bridge if demand hits a certain level (not the bridge itself), but from what I could work out the triggers for this are very, very unlikely E.g. a full capacity Oakwell, and a huge event in the town centre at the same time.
Looking at jobs we do at work based on the design and expectation and the costs of raw materials that looks about right. For context we have just repaired and replaced a flyover on Leeds think the job was approximately 50 million.
why can't there be both - new infrastructure which adds to the look of somewhere AND no one going hungry - why the false choice? I see this all the time on the Wakefield facebook page - people whinging about the council spending money on the town "because there's homeless people", very short sighted. If you go down south and look at the money spent there you'd be angry there weren't more things like this being built in the North.
£10m? Pah!!! If you want an expensive bridge going nowhere and underused the North has 'history'....... I give you......drum roll..... The Humber Bridge (serving the good people of Barton on Humber for over 40 years at the bargain price of £98m (original estimate £28m))
Im sure I read it somewhere, that once the bridge goes up and the crossing is permanently sealed ...high speed trains can run through Barnsley ....so it pays net work rail to invest
Having no crossing makes increasing the line speed a bit easier, but it’s highly unlikely we’ll see any faster trains on that line anytime soon. It’s the slower of the two Sheff-Leeds lines, has more speed restrictions, and doesn’t serve Wakefield Westgate. It does make it easier for longer trains to stop at Barnsley Interchange, but we’ll need platform extensions for that to become a reality.