Quote:
Originally Posted by The_Jazz
I have a friend who is intimately involved in bringing the Games to Chicago in 2016. He's working on the environmental committee trying to make the Games green. At this point, they think that they can make it either carbon neutral or potentially carbon negative (removing more carbon than they use).
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Is the CTA involved in this plan? They're either going to put people on the roads or move them around by CTA. I don't see how Chicago's infrastructure could handle either option. The idea of the CTA competing with Tokyo's transit system is not even at the level of a joke. The scheme to make condos and apts. out of Olympic builldings on the S. Side lakefront has to have taken a big hit with the collapsing real estate market. I'm amazed and dismayed the bid has gone this far.
Washington Park is nice and used by actual Chicagoans for their own self-organised sporting events. There are lots of runners and soccer players and little leaguers out there using it every day. I think they should get priority over a bunch of chemically enhanced beings pimping sneakers. And yes, pimping sneakers is what the post-Cold War olympics are all about. Even if it's a blow up stadium, i don't think the park is going to be the same afterwards.
I hate the Olympics for what they do to cities. Tokyo lost much more than it gained from the 1964 Olympics. Yes, that swimming pool is a cool piece of architecture, but think how much cooler Harajuku would be if there more of Harajuku. What the Americans didn't do to the Yamanote in the war, the Olympics finished off. And it didn't stop in Tokyo, either. Route 16 (of Yumin fame) was made to get people to the yachting events in Hayama, and that ruined some nice coast.
As a former resident of Yokohama & Kanagawa prefecture, i paid quite a bit in taxes for the 2002 World Cup. The world cup came and went. The stadium is still there, only there isn't much to do with it now. A few concerts and soccer games, but mostly it sits empty. Yokohama already had an Olympic soccer stadium left over from 1964!
I also go to help finance the crumbling and now largely unused Big Owe in Montreal. Aside from the big debt, Montreal also got such gems as the Mirabel airport -- make that cargo airport -- no, make that amusement park. Any argument that Big Sports benefit their locales should end with Montreal.