PennDOT has a back room; unofficial of course, deep in the bowels of their building(s) somewhere. It’s not on any of their floorplans or schematics but it’s there nonetheless. Every so often they summon the planners from the various state, county, & municipal highway departments, along with all of the local utilities & even the various tree trimming services.
The meeting always starts the same…"We want to do work on Road X; who has a project on a nearby parallel road or on our official detour that can commence at the same time so that we can really fuck up traffic?
Recent local examples include:
[ul]
[li]Two consecutive (Westbound) one-way roads closed for construction in the same block. This meant the Northbound road was taking triple the normal volume & was absolute gridlock.[/li][li]A local bridge is out. Of course there are/were separate construction projects on both a major & minor/residential road that are part of the official detour. Yup, the detours have detours.[/li][li]A local road was closed for underground pipe replacement. The official detour was the three streets that form a square with the closed road. One of those intersections was made extra narrow so that workers could install new ADA-compliant curb cuts at all four quadrants of the intersection. Now I’m all for handicapped access but on one side of the street that’s all there is, a curb cut. There’s no sidewalk (there is one on the other side of the street). There’s just a narrow strip of grass & then a retaining wall because there’s a parking lot that is below grade. :smack:[/li][/ul]
Today, the electric company hired tree trimmers were out doing their bi-annual pruning/clearing of the lines making the road that was an official detour & therefore have extra traffic on it down to one lane. They do this ½ a day every other year. Does it really have to happen on one of the few weeks when that road already has extra traffic on it?
I think that it’s quite possible that the same shadowy group issues construction permits in New York City.
It’s getting impossible to simply walk around the city. It really is.
Of course, as someone said above, “Never assume a conspiracy when it can be explained by simple incompetency.” Although in New York City, it’s more likely just plain old corruption. Real estate developers get to do whatever the fuck they want.
I try to believe organizations work better than they appear. Especially municipal employees working on infrastructure. The powers that be are aware there is a budget, employees are aware work needs to be done and they are inconveniencing everyone that looks at them. They also don’t want to work Sunday, like every bitching driver does driving through cones.
Build a deck with your friends once. It will be 7 working in unison or 6 dudes standing around while one guy is on the phone. All day long.
When I was little, I remember asking my mom who was in charge of the potholes, or something like that, and she told me PennDOT. I got the impression that PennDOT was the one who actually MADE them in the first place.
Quite frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if that were the truth. Around here our roads are so shitty you get pulled over for DUI if you’re NOT swerving all over the place.
Trust me. They would be just as bad at that as they are at the road stuff.
I don’t bitch about the workers because they’re just doing their jobs. It’s the higher-ups who couldn’t organize a potty break that get me :mad:.
It’s pretty bad when you’re driving in from out of state and you can tell when you crossed the state line because it’s suddenly like driving on the moon.
And the swerving is a public service announcement. It lets everyone else behind you know where the craters are.
Or lack of coordination; where I work (a municipal government), that’s probably the biggest source of friction both internally and externally, if I’d have to guess. Everyone plans just fine, but more or less within their own little silo.
PennDot is to begiven a fair bit of leeway and posessed of significant positive karma reserves for one glorious reason: their insistence on “ use both lanes until merge point” . This simple rule cuts down the deleterious effects of lane closures, at times significantly. Many states have not yet implemented this simple, sane rule, but then some states are just lines on a map enclosing populations with sadly high nut-job density. And I know some on this message board still don’t understand the logic and benefit of this simple concept: proving that, indeed, it’s taking a lot longer than we thought.
They don’t get a complete pass, of course. The situation observed by the OP happens too frequently. In Pittsburgh, when possible, they try to close at least two tunnels at the same time, because that is significantly more than double the fun. But they are not alone. In Detroit they like to detour you to whatever point the snow-plows stop servicing, at which point the detour signs end. In Atlanta, they bought 16.3 times as many orange barrels as they have storage for, the need to put these somewhere then leading to lane closures of stretches of roads where nothing ever has or will happen (it will of course cut down maintenance requirements on these lanes,as even decades later they are truly “like new” for lack of use, and so perhaps this is some level of DOT genius).
One thing KCMO has finally gotten right is this coordination. They used to be famous for resurfacing a street and sometimes within a day the water department (or electric or gas company) would dig a hole in it for a non-emergency repair. They finally are managing at least some coordination on that.
