I don’t know if it’s just me, but even the simplest roadworks seem to take forever these days. Currently, I can think of several simple resurfacing jobs which have been going on for weeks and months when I seem to recall in the past that bigger jobs were carried out in a fraction of the time.
In our city centre, one particular road was milled and resurfaced several weeks ago. Admittedly, the ‘raised ironworks’ signs were only there for about a week before the resurfacing was carried out. But the resurfaced road has had no white lines for at least three weeks. And guess what? They decided to do that final small thing during this morning’s rush hour! One lane closed on a major link to the city.
On another busy road, they’ve been ‘widening’ it by about a metre either side just outside a new business park for months now. Every day at 9am the temporary lights go up, about 30 workmen set about doing very little for an hour, then it’s time for a cup of tea until midday, then it’s lunch, then another hour or so of very little activity, then pack up and go home about 3-3.30pm.
And on yet another busy link road they’ve had it closed off at weekends for the last month or so, and even when it re-opened they still hadn’t painted the bloody lines on it.
Why the hell can’t someone make them contract to do nights and finish the work as quickly as possible?
Earlier this year (January, I think) there was a retaining wall which was being maintained. A sign said the work would take about 13 weeks to complete – why this long is anyone’s guess. After something like 18 weeks the sign was taken down and the work was eventually completed around June. Most of the time there was no one working and just a load of equipment with those wire fences narrowing this traffic blackspot down to one lane much of the time (temporary lights, of course). I suspect someone got a talking to, as the lights went and the fence was pushed in a bit so that two lanes could be maintained (notwithstanding morons using the chip shop, taxi drivers, buses, and so on parking in the narrowed area).
Why a simple job took 25 weeks (not the planned 13) of chaos is open to debate. But the damned road was again partially blocked this weekend because they’ve now decided to resurface it next to the retaining wall! Technically, the job still isn’t complete.