Yesterday's Standard carried some trenchant criticism of roadworks courtesy of Thames Water in and around Hammersmith & Fulham. Read it here.Particularly irate was Top Gear presenter James May but I think we all know what it means to be stuck in a bus inching forward around roadworks that have noone apparently working on them. The intelligence of these people is perhaps illustrated by one of my favourite pictures of life in the Bush - this roadmarking was made by one of our do-nothing road diggers. It said it all for me on so many levels.
James May seems ill informed if he thinks that they are there to improve the roads! The problem is that we expect a lot from the utilities, we expect it all to be "on tap" so to speak, but if our water, gas or electricity supplies are disturbed, the uproar is as noisy!
ReplyDeleteThinking about this the other day driving along Goldhawk Rd, it is not that long ago that the whole street network in the area including Wood Lne and so on was dug up for water works at a huge inconvenience to the same areas as now. Much has been required for electricity in the aarea of late due to poor infrastructure provision prior to Westfield.
And yet most of the current stuff is down the same trenches it seems, so why don't gas and water do works at the same time? and then we thought how ludicrous: the guys would have to take turns not to be there doing anything!
The other night, I spotted a bike locked to a bike lock, which was surrounded by that protective yellow gating. So much for the awareness of the diggers!
ReplyDelete(Although to be fair when I walked down the other afternoon, they were very much hard at work digging)