De: Alexandre Gomes - "Ainda não chegámos a isto"

Submetido por taf em Quinta, 2011-06-23 14:57

Infelizmente só em inglês mas dá para apanhar o sentido, e o absurdo.

SPAIN’S EU-FUNDED EXTRAVAGANCES Spain recently announced a high-speed rail link to the northwest region of Galicia, a plan many economists see as an extravagance. Bridge and highway projects are plowing forward in the face of criticism that Spain just can't afford them. Ciudad Real taxi driver Enrique Buendia, can hardly remember the last time he got a run to the new airport (...) a white elephant in a city of 74,000 people. The airports and other projects illustrate how they drove themselves into a debt swamp. Ciudad Real's airport is busy compared to two-year-old Huesca airport, whose 30 employees won't see a commercial flight for some six months. Its restaurant is busy, but with local people and because it serves good meals. Then there's Castellon on the airport-abundant eastern coast. Costing some € 150 million, it opened in March and hasn't yet seen a plane. At its entrance there is to be a 24-meter statue to Carlos Fabra, the provincial president of Castellon who commissioned the project. Léon, Zapatero's hometown, has turned a military airport into a commercial one but it has only a handful of flights a week. The city of 200,000 inhabitants is already reachable by a modern highway and now is promised a high-speed rail stop. Southern Murcia has just built a second airport, half an hour away from its good old one. Now Toledo, an hour away from Ciudad Real, might be building its own, too. "This is a country of fiefdoms, like the Middle Ages, you know 'I want my airport ... my convention center and my high-speed train,'" said a foreign investor.

Alexandre Borges Gomes
Islamabad