More Road Delays

I really didn't want to post about Greenpeace activists camping in trees, but I enjoyed some of the quotes from this article.

Young Poles battle government over swampland

By Monika Filipiuk
Mon 19 Mar 2007

ROSPUDA VALLEY, Poland (Reuters) - Scores of young activists camped in a remote peat bog in the northeast of Poland last month and threatened to chain themselves to trees to stop bulldozers clearing land for a highway.

That kind of civil disobedience was forbidden under communism. It was also unnecessary: by the 1980s infrastructure projects had ground to a halt.

By 2007, the word "infrastructure" had disappeared from the Polish language. OK, maybe I just need a better dictionary.

Now the government is launching a 100-billion zloty (17.7 billion pound) expansion of its road network...

For our U.S. dollar readers, that's about 30 bill. And in Canada, 30.5.

Environmentalists concede Poland needs to expand its 570-km (356-mile) network of highways.

Measure it anyway you like it, that's not a lot of highways for a big country. I had to read that sentence six times.

Lorries and international traffic choke two-lane roads and frustrated drivers run over the centre lines, creating makeshift third lanes and causing hundreds of accidents a year.

Ah, the legendary third lane. Where oncoming traffic doesn't slow you down from pulling out and passing.

3/22/2007 update:
EU gets involved