It looks to me like the thing has just been tucked under there for storage - probably not in use.
I suspect some of the other photos in that gallery aren’t exactly as captioned either.
Except that wasn’t what happened at all. Just really bad reporting. Previous thread.
That was my guess as well. Actually, I assumed art, but either way, it wasn’t like someone was trying to paint the lines on the road.
As for the merry go round. I’m going to assume that it’s just where they pushed it when it was out of use, not that they use it under there.
The three balconies…probably done for looks.
Hand sanitizer, it’s probably broken.
The tree…they didn’t cut a hole and put wires through it, they trimmed the tree as it grew around the wires.
A lot of these have decent explanations.
Or possibly a door from the loft space space has been bricked up and plastered over.
Yup - stopgap solution to stop people a)complaining that the dispenser is broken and b)walking off with the bottle, or leaving it where nobody will see it.
Possibly a lesson to the owner not to park where the are big signs telling him not to park there because they are going to paint yellow lines along the pavement.
I have also seen a photo of yellow lines painted across a flattened cardboard box in the gutter and a dead badger in the middle of the road with a line painted across it.
Yep, I saw a dead possum on the side of a road with a white strip painted across his body. 
Yeah. Google possum road stripe and you can see a bunch of those.
The pictures where the old sign wasn’t removed or there are trees blocking a path or parking may represent projects that aren’t complete. In the case of a sign, if the condition is not as described in the contract (sign overgrown), the contractor will ask for a change order and more money. Sometimes they get it and sometimes they get told that the project description instructed them to inspect the actual conditions. Either way, they come back later and finish up.
In the case of the blocking trees, it might be a different subcontractor taking them out and the scheduling got messed up. Or it could be a bad design. Or a decent design and a group successfully fought taking out the tree and now they’re stuck. Or someone forgot to net the tree before nesting season and they can’t take it out until the baby birds have fledged. It can get complicated.
Our building inspectors bring back photos of this kind of thing every so often. The one I remember best is the business that put the required handicap parking spot right in front of their roll-up garage door. Another was where the parking spot had the required concrete bumper at the end but laid it across a sewer manhole.
I was just reading about the British submarine “Thetis”, which sank during a test run in 1939.
It seems that when crewmen opened a torpedo tube door, they didn’t realize it was open to the sea, a massive amount of water rushed in and caused the sub to sink to the bottom (very few survivors). It turned out that while painting the tube, someone had allowed enamel paint to drip into a test valve, clogging it and giving a false dry reading when they checked it.
Oops.
I live on the top floor (no. 16) of my apartment building in Moscow. There is still a balcony above mine, between it and the roof. It acts as an awning, giving some protection from the sun and bad weather. The same is true all around my block of high-rises.
Holy crap! That curb is totally invisible! I would absolutely get tripped up on that.
I agree that there was probably access to the third balcony, which was subsequently walled off. All they need to do is remove the railing, and then the third balcony can serve only as a roof for the second.
Either that or they ran out of refill bags & just took normal hand soap off the shelf.
Not really. You either turn around and pull in the other way or wait.
Those examples weren’t shoddy, they were well-made! Well-made but wrong.
Some of these look like a work in progress and hardly any of them have anything to do with shoddy workmanship. They should have just titled it “Some semi-funny photos we ripped off from much better sites with much better photos”
Tree and power line - normal, albeit a rather pronounced example
Asphalting around a car - They probably worked around it while they tracked down the owner, I seriously doubt they left it that way.
Painting around a fallen branch - I’ll accept, but I always wonder if the people driving the trucks can’t stop and get out to move things so they just paint it and someone comes back later to fix it.
Merry-go-round - Obviously a storage space, or it’s been moved there. No one installed it like that.
Tree in the parking space - Not shoddy workmanship, someone did a good job of painting the lines for the space but line painters don’t carry chain saws. The tree guy is probably coming the next day, or maybe the owner of the building forgot to call the tree guy. Or maybe he’s going to leave it for motorcycle parking or just because it’s funny.
The yellow lines on the vehicle probably aren’t true, the paint appears to go up under the grille, but there’s no paint on the grille. Ah, I found a larger image, it looks like yellow tape because the way it hangs off the bumper and goes under the wipers. So, this appears to be staged.
The bike path with a tree in it isn’t really workmanship.
The wheelchair ramp looks new, the railing guy is probably coming the next day to take out the old rail and put in a new one.
Third balcony- I agree with the above comments.
Door blocked by pavement - Not shoddy workmanship. The owner needs to stop being cheap and pay someone to remove the door and build a wall in it’s place but judging by the way the rectangular door was fit into an arched opening, I doubt he cares.
Bike arrow into poles - I’ll accept, but I bet the poles were added later and the paint guy hasn’t been back to redo it yet. I doubt someone painted the arrow pointing straight at the poles.
2 stop signs - I’ll accept, though the old one appears to be buried solidly, they probably couldn’t get it out and forgot to come back and finish it. But hey, I see nothing wrong with leaving it for a stop sign thief to save on removal/disposal.
Soap taped to dispenser - Obviously broken or out of soap. At work, our paper towel dispenser broke so we took a coat hanger and hung a roll of paper towels off it for a couple days until it was fixed. No newspapers accused us of shoddy workmanship for it though.
I confess in almost 25 years of driving I’ve never seen anyone do that, The common practice is to pull slightly ahead of the hose point so that you don’t have it trail over the roof.
I agree with Novelty Bobble. That’s the way my dad taught me to do it and the way I still do it today, when necessary.
30-odd years ago, in my old hometown of Vancouver, WA, they built a huge new shopping mall. And somehow, nobody noticed until the work was complete that the only public restrooms in the entire mall were the pair inside the attached Sears store :smack:
Where I live, I’ve always seen road stripe painting done very late at night/in the wee hours of the morning when there is very little traffic. I suspect it’s the same elsewhere. Since they’re working in the dark, it’s not a stretch to suppose that a crew member might glance away at just the wrong moment and fail to notice the roadkill/trash before painting over it.
Of course, that doesn’t excuse painting around that branch. That one looks too deliberate.
It’s the Daily Mail. I’d be surprised if half the pictures weren’t photoshopped.