Criticism
Much of the criticism is that money is being spent on the rich at the expense of the poor. Critics contend that it does not serve any of the townships of Gauteng where the transport problem is severe and where the majority of the people live. However, supporters maintain that the train was never meant to be an alternative to mass public transport instead, it was intended to reduce pressure on Johannesburg's overloaded highway system. Figures released by the Gauteng provincial government in 2003 indicated that the project would do little to relieve traffic on the over-used Ben Schoeman Highway (one of the major motivations for the project), as traffic volumes would be higher when the Gautrain was completed and operating at full capacity in 2010. Leftist political groupings like the SACP and labour movements like COSATU branded the Gautrain as a train for the rich and called on government not to proceed with the project. A national parliamentary oversight body, the Transport Portfolio Committee, held public hearings in November 2005 and subsequently advised Cabinet to scrap or postpone the project. However, National Cabinet decided on 7 December 2005 to financially support Gautrain.
Read more about this topic: Gautrain
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“It is ... pathetic to observe the complete lack of imagination on the part of certain employers and men and women of the upper-income levels, equally devoid of experience, equally glib with their criticism ... directed against workers, labor leaders, and other villains and personal devils who are the objects of their dart-throwing. Who doesn’t know the wealthy woman who fulminates against the “idle” workers who just won’t get out and hunt jobs?”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)