These two excuses for “organisations” are really ticking me off at the moment.
I’ve written about the huge damage the Nottinghamshire County Council (NCC) has wrought on hedgerows around here (after many years of not touching them at all). I’ve also commented on the appalling gritting service provided during the bad weather (i.e. none at all during the worst parts) by both the Nottingham City Council and the County version. In fact – now that the snow has gone – I am biding my time, waiting for my car to be damaged as it goes through a major pothole so that I can claim against the idiots who will now take months to do anything about the problem.
But my latest gripe involves blocking roads to carry out minor roadworks operations, and taking weeks to complete it.
First of all, on the A60 in Ruddington there are temporary railings up in various places (the kind which narrow the road). They’ve been there for a week now, and they have spread down the road as the week has gone on to places where they prevent or restrict the movement of two-way traffic. There is also one of those converted containers from a lorry which serves as a site office just at the end of Landmere Lane.
What are they doing? They are surfacing – or I should say “resurfacing” – the bloody bus stops. Not on the road, but on the pavement.
- There was nothing wrong with the original surfaces
- The road is in a far worse state than the bus stops
- The workmen appear mid morning and by mid afternoon they are in that bloody site office drinking tea until they leave well before 3.30pm
- They don’t work weekends
It’s no wonder this work takes weeks – if it was being orgainised and carried out by chimps it could be done quicker. It really should only take a few days. I’m also pretty sure that idiotic Health & Safety rules are the reason it causes so much disruption, with temporary lights if traffic would come within 100 metres of a workman in the brief periods during which he’s actually working.
The second thing bugging me is how the Council has closed a lane permanently on Huntingdon Street outside the Litmus Buildings. There used to be a left filter lane and two straight-ahead lanes – but our illustrious idiots decided that the left filter lane should go to make room for a huge pedestrian area (which was huge to start with). Why?
These idiots are known to be car-haters, and all councils (wherever they are) are staffed with the kind of people who should work in nursery schools and care homes but who, instead, become responsible for hard decisions affecting the entire population (if it isn’t things like this, it is multi-colored wheelie bins where you “can only put potato peelings in the green one if there is an R in the months, and it isn’t raining, and if snow isn’t forecast – but not otherwise, and add the number you first thought of”).
It might have something to do with the Council’s attitude towards the darlings who live in the Litmus Buildings. It may have something to do with the number of far-eastern students we have at the moment, who seem to spend most of their time standing in the middle of busy roads looking vacantly upwards (why do they do that?), having ignored the pretty coloured lights, and some of whom will have no doubt fallen foul of this foolish activity and prompted a “safety review”. Who knows? But it sure doesn’t help the traffic flow when people want to turn left – and it is now a very sharp left, so very slow – during rush hour.
And they haven’t even removed the old lines or partially covered arrows. They can’t even carry out bad decisions in a proper way.
And the third thing involves the absolute chaos they have allowed to develop down in Hyson Green. The traffic lights have been out for at least a week and replaced with temporary ones – again, it seems to be down entirely to resurfacing the pedestrian crossings on the pavements (not the roads). And when I went to pick up a pupil down there yesterday, it turned out they had closed off the Nottingham-bound side of Radford Road from the Asda garage (though not the darling trams… oh no. They were still allowed to move). It was gridlocked chaos.
I haven’t got a clue what insane purpose this is going to serve, or why they chose to just block off the road for the weekend and then do nothing. Knowing the idiots involved in all this it wouldn’t surprise me if they ended up turning Hyson Green into a no-car zone – it’s just the kind of area the Council is likely to do that to. I DO know that no one was working yesterday to get it done quickly (big surprise there then).
The roads are an absolute disgrace with potholes. The idiots at both Councils will no doubt need months of meetings before they even start to send men out with tarmac and shovels (and lots of cones and site offices to enable them to turn a few hours worth of work into a week long catastrophe). Obviously, putting new tarmac down on all the bus stops is much more important.
Incidentally, I should also point out that the bus stop work does involve replacing ONE kerbstone as well. It is much higher than the others (well, maybe 6 cm at most taller than it was before) – no doubt this is where the bus is supposed to stop to prevent passengers having to step on to the bus! I would imagine that the whole exercise is going to involve hugely expensive retraining of bus drivers (who stop wherever they bloody well want), and is in response to the millions of people the Council’s Health & Safety primates believe have died in the last 12 months due to having to step on to a bus.