Meanwhile, a hundred feet away, another crew are jackhammering up a sidewalk that they poured two weeks ago.
Who is in charge of this Mickey Mouse operation and how do they still have a job??
SOMA Nature Walk, hemorrhagic tax dollars edition
These guys are digging a trench in a road that was poured literally two days ago. Prior to two days ago, this road was an open dirt hole covered with movable steel plates for close to two years.
Tags: doomed, firstperson, photography, sf, sprawl
Location: 37° 46' 51.32" N, 122° 23' 59.13" W
17 Responses:
Maybe they're digging for pirate gold
"Okay, come on, seriously, has anyone seen my car keys?"
Mickey Mouse? If they receive funding based on the amount of work they do, it looks like they scheduled it quite intelligently.
Can't help it:
http://youtu.be/N8b3963VRW4
I really couldn't.
They should switch from concrete to Legos.
I hope George found his keychain.
on the Mandela parkway by my old warehouse various folks completely dug up and repaved the same place 6 times in less than two years
So, people were sufficiently annoyed about this in the UK to try to forbid it. That's the purpose of the New Roads and Street Works Act 1991. No non-emergency digging for a period of time after you lay new tarmac. Utility companies have to provide advanced notice of planned works to local authorities, obtain a permit and co-ordinate to share access where practical (incentivised by discounts for co-ordinated permits).
And then the consequence of that is that surprisingly often you can't have whatever it is you want quickly, because it would require digging up new road or recently re-paved road and that's now prohibited. There's an exception for new supply to a property, so they can cut into the road to give you mains power or whatever for a new home. But upgrades don't get special treatment, so there are places where it's an economic no brainer to deliver VDSL "fibre-based" Internet, say 80Mbps service to a hundred homes that previously got weak 2Mbps ADSL - but the local authority put down brand new tarmac and now those people have to wait a year or so to get faster Internet.
Funny story. There was a jackhammer outside my apartment's window pretty much every couple of weeks for three years during the "gotta get our own fiber into the ground!!" gold rush of the early 2000s. Seriously, different crews digging up the street, pushing cables, this side, that side, back again, for years. Funny story: still no fiber to my building.
Wait, are you telling me that the city is overlayed with a mesh of allegedly idle fiber? Just sitting there? In this day and age where richies are buying negative interest bonds? Gee, I wonder what THEY are doing with it.
My current business provider has thousands of miles of dark fibre ready to light for customers, most of it dating to the late 1990s.
Sad, really.
If its dark and useless people should cut it up.
If its not in fact dark, people should know that.
We already have this law, so that's not the problem. Excavations are forbidden for five years on newly-paved roads in San Francisco. This was largely enacted in response to the stupidity on 3rd St (I assume) that jwz refers to in another comment.
*facepalm*
For construction around my area, I often go up and ask. One time a beautiful six-lane concrete highway several miles long got dug up for a couple hundred yards and replaced with asphalt. I guess it was about a year later. Turns out there was some unexpected ground settling and major cracks were about to form. The asphalt more tolerant to that, also cheaper.
I also learned if we could just close the entire road, shit would take a lot less time: like from two years down to three months. I'd like to see which would cause more traffic problems overall, and how much it would cost to pay the businesses to stay open.
how else are they going to keep the street surface consistent with those in the rest of SOMA if they don't immediately chop it up into bits? or... maybe they failed to correctly set up all the pieces needed for next year's surprise sinkhole.
SSC: i have a car, and get a perverse enjoyment out of the combat/video-game style driving required in this area of SF.
New York City has this exact same problem, and if you think the public has figured out that this is nonsense and they have ceased to vote for the bozos who allow this to continue without any master planning at all, I have news for you...