
Recently, the London Free Press printed a great article outlining the decision by London City Council to invest $12m to install audible cross walk buttons around the city. Unfortunately, the article was then followed up the next day with an absolutely brutal poll on the LFP’s website asking: “Spending $12M on London crosswalk traffic-light buttons is: Ridiculous or Reasonable?” As you probably expected, 86% of over 1000 votes went with “Ridiculous.”
A fair and balanced report followed up by misdirection, misinformation and basically “gotcha journalism.”
We figure the poll would have swung a bit differently if the question had been “Spending $12M to save the lives of hundreds in London: Reasonable or Ridiculous?”
At least we hope so…

Update:
We’ve gotten some local blog coverage of this comic, which you can see at:
Rockin’ On: The Blog
Our London
Nobody is against shelling out $12M to save “hundreds” of lives. The question is, are there cheaper, equally effective options. I have to believe there are.
In those 2 short sentences, you brought more complexity to the issue than the LFPress…which is a little frightening!
Speaking of complexity, a problem with this article is that it never explains what the cost of a NON-accessible button is. As I understand it, the “real” cost here is the cost of putting in the new button (in terms of labour and equipment) and not the actual device.
To go a step further, and I might be totally wrong here, but I’m under the impression that these aren’t being all replaced at once, but rather as the buttons need replacing.
Great post – raises the issues and the impact.