willc.me

Londoners manage to find quite a bit to grumble about. But nothing more so than the perpetual roadworks that we have to endure. I had a coffee meeting the other day in South Kensington and we sat outside a cafe. It was like viewing the building of the pyramids, just not as efficient. But why does it seem that every road has works on it?

Well apparently, the amount of works are increasing. Not surprising as the city gets older and people demand more to be put underground in the form of fibre optic cables and more power. According to Transport For London (TFL) there was a 4% increase in August alone.

In Westminster, there used to be 20,000 roadwork sites a year and now it’s up to 28,000. So what is to blame? Well, Thames Water apparently. They’re doing a massive project to replace all the Victorian water mains so this involves digging up literally every street.

But it’s not just them, TFL are to blame too. This is the time when they have to start commissioning work in order to spend the rest of their budget. If they don’t spend it all, it’ll get slashed and if you’re a worthless bureaucrat, that’s the last thing you want to happen. It’s akin to having your dick chopped off.

On my dad’s street, he was enraged to find a portaloo outside his house. They were replacing the pavement on the street which he’s on the corner of. Hardly anyone uses it and there was no damage so he called them up to find out why he had to deal with the smell of Polish shit wafting through his window in the morning.

The pen pusher at the other end of the line said that it was a category 1 project. Meaning the lowest of importance and that work was being done because there were too many roadworks on the bigger streets. That makes sense. Why only have roadworks on the big roads when you could congest all the roads.

But it’s not just the fact that there are so many. It’s also the case that they work so slowly. In the course of the meeting, we watched two builders meander over to where two paving stones needed to be laid in a hole that was already cut for it. There was a pile of sand and even to our untrained eye it was obvious that they needed to put the sand in the hole and use the suction machine they had to drop the stones in place.

But no. They walked over and gawped at the hole for 5 minutes. Then they crawled to the sand with shovels and started filling the hole. Very, very slowly. What should have taken 10 minutes took 45. It’s the managers fault. They need to stimulate the workforce. Maybe with cattle prods.

Perhaps with the rising unemployment we should start a volunteer service where anyone can work on the works to speed them up. That would help though I doubt health and safety would be down with it.