Intervention: Ridiculous

Ridiculous
Ridiculous
Click to enlarge

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…

Poll asking "Spending $12M on London crosswalk traffic-light buttons is: Ridiculous or Reasonable" with "Ridiculous" receiving 84% of the vote
Captured off the London Free Press website on January 18th, 2011

Update:
We’ve gotten some local blog coverage of this comic, which you can see at:
Rockin’ On: The Blog
Our London

4 comments

  1. 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.

    1. 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.

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