Its an interesting debate. Pros and cons on both sides. I was in Budapest in 2005 for the Hungarian grand prix, which coincided with the last week of the tour. There was a huge hula-baloo in all the European newspapers about the tour and if my memory serves I posted on of the articles either here or in the old S/C website chat room. The issue is that, "Yes", the tour is expensive and infrastructure is largely funded from the French Tax payer, now rightly or not (depending on how you see it) spending huge sums of tax payers money to resurface,rebuild or build small roads seldom used or Alpine roads that are only otherwise used for three months of the year, or spruce up towns and small infrastructure is a contentious issue, a lot of folk believe the money could be better spent elsewhere. Its a personal opinion. The other issue is hooliganism, many towns, villages and farmers on route suffer from the tour due to vandalism, drunkeness, hooliganism, squatting, illegal occupation and people just generally taking over and sleeping in the town square - a lot, a very lot, of tour spectators see the tour as an event where the sole aim is to get drunk and be seen on TV, Scantily clad, fat, drunk males vomiting in the flower pots dos little to endear the conservative town public to the tour. The other issue of people just going along to see what the fuss is about can be easily justified. I was in London for the tour last year, it was a joke, I would guess 99% of the people on the streets had no idea what a bike race was about, less than 1 in 5 could even name one rider and those that could only knew Bradley Wiggins. Most of them just came along to see the event, show support for london and some national pride - theres nothing wrong with that, but if 1% made the trip to Paris this year due to their exposure to the race in London I will be very surprised. Of course its not all like that, but that is the factual grim underbelly of the tour, sure there are a lot of people who go and watch because they enjoy it and put up with a lot of hardship along the way, but there is no doubt, LA had a great effect on the tour, people did want to see him and publicity wise the tour is worse off without him. That said I agree with Linnega, the tour is in no danger of dying out, it has issues like everything else, but the majority of the French Public will still support it simply due to National pride, however as we all know, France is now 40% Algerian, Moroccan, Indian, Muslim and Arabic, they have no interest in the tour and are a very voiceferous part of French public opinion.