{"id":39743,"date":"2004-04-19T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2004-04-19T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2004\/04\/19\/a-2-billion-bridge-to-one-person\/"},"modified":"2004-04-19T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2004-04-19T07:00:00","slug":"a-2-billion-bridge-to-one-person","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20040419-00\/?p=39743","title":{"rendered":"A $2 billion bridge to one person"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i>The New York Times<\/i> reported on  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2004\/04\/10\/national\/10ALAS.html\">  two enormous construction projects of dubious merit<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"q\"><p>    [The first bridge]  would connect [Ketchikan, population 7845]  to an island that has about 50 residents and the area&#8217;s airport,  which offers six flights a day (a few more in summer).  It could cost about $200 million.  <\/p>\n<p>  The other bridge would span an inlet for nearly  two miles to tie Anchorage to a port  that has a single regular tenant and almost no homes or businesses.  It would cost up to $2 billion.  <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>  The first bridge replaces a five minute ferry ride  with a drive that most likely will take even longer.<\/p>\n<p>  And the representative from Alaska behind these pointless  construction projects is hardly ashamed of this.  Quite the contrary:  He&#8217;s proud of his achievement.  <\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"q\"><p>  &#8220;I stuffed it like a turkey.&#8221;  <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>  United States politics is not about trying to make the world a better  place.  It&#8217;s about doing whatever it takes to get re-elected.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The New York Times reported on two enormous construction projects of dubious merit: [The first bridge] would connect [Ketchikan, population 7845] to an island that has about 50 residents and the area&#8217;s airport, which offers six flights a day (a few more in summer). It could cost about $200 million. The other bridge would span [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-39743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>The New York Times reported on two enormous construction projects of dubious merit: [The first bridge] would connect [Ketchikan, population 7845] to an island that has about 50 residents and the area&#8217;s airport, which offers six flights a day (a few more in summer). It could cost about $200 million. The other bridge would span [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39743\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}