Quote:
Originally Posted by esquire
It's so big and so audacious, even to this day... it easily fit right in with the NFL stadiums of its era, let alone the CFL. Only Vancouver and Montreal can also say that.
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There is such a huge gap between the kinds of projects that were successfully completed in Edmonton in the 1970's and what might be built in a comparable Canadian city today. Commonwealth stadium and the LRT both opened within a few years and Edmonton was a Kitchener-Waterloo style and scaled metro area, with much less economic activity back then, growing at what's now a fairly standard rate in Canada.
The excuses given for why we can't build things today were all true back in the 1970's. Inflation and economic issues, disruptions, etc. The 2020's so far are a lot like the 70's.
I think we are going to find that we do not have enough infrastructure in the next decade and it will impinge on our quality of life. As a hypothetical scenario imagine that prices to attend events at stadiums go way up beyond what we are already accustomed to and it becomes normal for people to commute only in small portions of metro areas, like how a lot of third world cities function. Eventually I think this norm will break and there will be politicians who have a "break a few eggs" mentality, don't care about the sacred cows we have now, and change course. The window of opportunity to make the transition more gracefully is rapidly closing or already gone.