Its Political Correctess Gone Mad...

[st_files]

...I tell you....

http://www.spectator.co.uk/essays/5336906/chucking...

£97,000,000 to build disabled access to One London Underground station, and wheelchair users still wont be able to get on the trains....it really beggars belief....

Edited by st_files on Monday 28th September 17:09

[Eric Mc]

Tired old headline.

A shocking headline would be "Political Correctness Extremely Sensible".

[Ayahuasca]

Better would be "It's political correct-ass gonad!"

[eldar]

Eric Mc said:

Tired old headline.

A shocking headline would be "Political Correctness Extremely Sensible".

More like wasting £97,000,000 for no apparent benefit?

[Hedders]

Article said:

About 600 (wheelchair users) actually live close enough to the station to reach it in a wheelchair. It would be cheaper to give each of those people a free car and chauffeur for the rest of their lives (assuming they don’t have one already — this is Mayfair, after all).

FFS...

[grumbledoak]

TfL really do want rounding up and shooting. Not a brain cell among them, it seems.

[davido140]

To play devils advocate, I'm sure its very helpful to disabled people that dont use wheelchairs but have decreased mobility. Also pushchairs, and people with a lot of luggage.

[Dunk76]

One of the lads temping at my company used to work for TfL designing tube stations, on around £50,000pa. He got made redundant, with appropriate pay-out, and then re-employed five months later (three weeks ago) on a rolling contract at, wait for it folks; £75,000pa.

[turbobloke]

davido140 said:

To play devils advocate, I'm sure its very helpful to disabled people that dont use wheelchairs but have decreased mobility. Also pushchairs, and people with a lot of luggage.

At a mere £97million, to be very helpful it would need to cause more than 20 of them to win Wednesday's lottery. Otherwise 599 of the 600 it might help will carry on using their chauffeur-driven Cayenne Turbo.

ETA or more accurately, a different one of them to win a Wednesday jackpot for each of the next 20 - 30 weeks.

Edited by turbobloke on Monday 28th September 19:23

[Bing o]

davido140 said:

.... people with a lot of luggage.

Then get a cab and fk off out of the way of 99% of people who are trying to get to work!!

[Eric Mc]

eldar said:

Eric Mc said:

Tired old headline.

A shocking headline would be "Political Correctness Extremely Sensible".

More like wasting £97,000,000 for no apparent benefit?

Talk about missing the point.

I wasn't commenting on the nature of the apparent waste - but the tiredness of the thread title.

Intending to provide disability access at an underground station is nothing to do with Political Correctness at all.

Cocking up the project has everything to do with bad management and incompetence.

[st_files]

Eric Mc said:

eldar said:

Eric Mc said:

Tired old headline.

A shocking headline would be "Political Correctness Extremely Sensible".

More like wasting £97,000,000 for no apparent benefit?

Talk about missing the point.

I wasn't commenting on the nature of the apparent waste - but the tiredness of the thread title.

Intending to provide disability access at an underground station is nothing to do with Political Correctness at all.

Cocking up the project has everything to do with bad management and incompetence.

Going ahead with this ludicrous project when it doesnt actually help disabled access is a classic case of political correctness gone mad - would this project still be going ahead if it wasnt a disabled access project? Of course there should be more disabled access, but this example seems lunacy.

[zac510]

It's a noble goal, to provide disabled access, but if it's purely driven by the desire to be politically correct at whatever cost then it really is mad.

[Eric Mc]

zac510 said:

It's a noble goal, to provide disabled access, but if it's purely driven by the desire to be politically correct at whatever cost then it really is mad.

Does it matter what the driver is - as long as the projects achieve their aim and are not ludicrously expensive.

I'm all for helping the disabled. The vast bulk of Underground stations are absolutely out of bounds to the wheelchair bound so making them more accessible has to be good.
The aim isn't the problem, it's the prosecution of the aim that went wrong.

[zac510]

Yes, agree.

[Dunk76]

Perhaps if TfL spent £97,000,000 doing something about the (deliberately) atrocious road network in London then there wouldn't be such a pressing need for disabled access as the other schemes (Blue Badge, community car/bus services etc) could actually function as intended.

It's a fairly typical approach of the public bodies over the last 20+ years - fix the nice-to-haves rather than concentrating on getting the fundamentals right.

[Wanstead]

I spent a few years working on this project and a nice little earner it was too.
Oh and they are not disabled, they are ‘mobility impaired persons’.
The ‘It would be cheaper to give each of those people a free car’ line was joked about in meetings on the project years ago, but I can’t complain, it paid for my cars and my racing for a while.

[st_files]

Wanstead said:

I spent a few years working on this project and a nice little earner it was too.
Oh and they are not disabled, they are ‘mobility impaired persons’.
The ‘It would be cheaper to give each of those people a free car’ line was joked about in meetings on the project years ago, but I can’t complain, it paid for my cars and my racing for a while.

Can I ask, did no one see the folly in building the access when the wheelchair user still wont be able to get on the train? I was sort of hoping that this was all blown out of proportion!

[JagLover]

Eric Mc said:

Cocking up the project has everything to do with bad management and incompetence.

As far as I can see it has not been 'cocked up' but is an inevitable consequence of building new access tunnels. It would be far cheaper, and of far more benefit to the disabled, to spend a fraction of the money on improving transport for the disabled.

[hornetrider]

Sweet Jesus

article said:

With its 163 staff paid over £100,000 a year (the Treasury, responsible for the entire British economy, manages with 15), TfL is the RBS of public transport, a bloated behemoth walking dangerously close to the third rail.