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# Man on the bridge : I wasn't going to write about it, but I've come across the story a few times, and since this guy already wasted 30 minutes of my life, I might as well give him 30 minutes more, and hope that something might come out of it.

In a nutshell, yesterday morning at around 6am, some guy climbed up the superstructure of one of the bridges to the South Shore. The bridge was shut down for twelve hours while police tried to get him down, resulting in a messy morning and evening rush hour as traffic was diverted to our other bridges.

Why did the guy do this? To raise awareness for Fathers-4-Justice, an organization that supports the father's right to raise his children.

Okay.

(Go ahead, ask me if I or any of the thousands of people affected by his stunt are feeling particularly sympathetic towards him?)

"Vas-y, saute!" a crié hier matin un automobiliste qui circulait près du pont Jacques-Cartier.

According to the news item linked above, the police are still deciding if they are going to press charges. WTF!?!

If it were up to me (and thank God it never is), I would sentence this fellow to the following: (1) He must serve time in prison equal to the time he stole from everyone stuck in traffic. Let's be conservative and guess that 50,000 people lost about an hour each. That's about 5 years. Sounds good. (2) Fine him for an amount equal to the amount of extra gas that was consumed by those cars. Again, let’s make a wild estimate: 50,000 cars idling for 1 hour, which based on some data I dug up, works out to about 82,000 liters of gas wasted. At $1.30/liter, that's just over $100,000. Hmm. Not too impressive, but I guess it will do.

So there you go: five years and a $100,000 fine.

What do you think? Am I being too harsh? Should he be charged at all?