Living near a major road reconstruction project is always educational. Sometimes comical, sometimes depressing. Like most other amateur superintendents, the constant digging, filling, and redigging the same spots breeds a certain cynicism: “They must’ve left someone down there yesterday.”
In the first picture below, the new pavement on Somerset at Preston has been cut by the traffic department to install a traffic loop. That wire measures traffic behaviour so that light timing can be adjusted to vehicular traffic flow.
Notice that the loop crosses the lines painted for the cross walk. Alas, the painted cross walk was temporary, until the more substantial and more respected concrete cross walk could be installed. A large saw cuts the cross walk outline, the asphalt removed, and concrete poured. What happened to the traffic cable?
Coordination is remarkably time consuming, so maybe we are better off having each city department just install their stuff and resolve the conflicts afterwards. Here is a conflict just a block west of the intersection shown above. The squares of brick inset in the concrete sidewalk are just temporary, until the new 21’x 3′ tree planters come later this fall. The brick bits will be removed at that time, revealing the underground irrigation system for the trees in the planters. In the meantime, the sign guys decided this would be a great spot for one of the fifty or so signs they have decided we need on this one long block of Somerset.
This is the same lack of thinking that prevents the burying of services downtown. Hydro has no money to dig to bury the wires, and the city sewer folks are prevented from putting in a small conduit for wires when they dig streets up to replace the sewers.
It is also sad that every year council has to search to find money for programs, when contracting issues have been handled so ineffectively for years (I guess its not so ineffective for the paving companies.)