Pavement protection

[The Duke]

Id of liked to of been a civil servant in the days of the empire. Seemed a good gig.

[PlaneMan]

My father was a civil servant for almost all his working life. He used to get paid quadruple time for working weekends, 2.5 time for overtime and I think it was 5 time for major holidays like Christmas. The only ones that saw any of that extra money was the rugby club and local pubs.

Yes, he’s a wucking fanker, I believe in customs and excise at the time it was mandatory.

[Richard]

Ed, for all I know you may very well be right. Like the loon who decided to put in islands about every 100 yards along one road – to help the pedestrians cross. The snag was that they would cross from a small but existing pavement to a pedestrian hostile grassy bank. The local repair shops did a holiday funding trade until the islands were removed a few weeks later. The damned things were unlit and at night were lethal.

They put in ‘speed cameras’, (also known as taxmen in drag). The problem was that yes there were 13 deaths in a short period, but on the other side of a bend in the road… I could go on but we all know the point.

I was a civil servant for a year or two back in the 1960s, but then it was all change again. Still I did retain one perk for a while, while nominally not an overtime grade I worked so many excess hours in one period that I exceeded all of the thresholds for payments and once the problems eased had abundant time off in lieu.

Later on with a different lot I built up a store of untaken overseas leave built up due to staff and skill shortages. I was able to sell that to the pension fund, thank goodness as the outfit was then run into the ground before I reached retirement age so some of my shortfall was made good.

 

[Ed P]

Don’t get me wrong – there ARE competent Civil Servants who do excellent completed staff work. Unfortunately these people tend to be few in number and grossly overworked as a result of having to carry a lot of incompetent, lazy staffers, and their equally lazy managers.

County Council Highways Depts have decision making responsibility for all the areas about which you complain but most have suffered due to Government budget cuts – forcing into retirement those higher paid experienced staff who knew their jobs, and replacing them with cheaper inexperienced new hires. Quick ineffective fixes are the order of the day.

If you wonder why the roads seem to keep getting huge potholes in the same place, and far more than they ever did in the past, perhaps it is time to consider if the Highways Dept have any idea what they are doing. Just maybe it is because they are merely slinging in a quick temporary filler of tarmac instead of doing a proper job of cutting out and possibly installing sub-surface drainage. A criminal waste of money. (sorry I’ve ranted enough about Highways Depts).

[Drezha]

I worked for an ex public service that was now private. I left after a year (in reality, I would have left earlier, but I was using the time to try and join the RAF) because I couldn’t get on with the public service mentality that still pervaded (and the union – I’ve never come across a union in an engineering firm elsewhere before ever!).

Maybe it was a good idea I didn’t get in to the RAF!

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Richard]

There was one aspect of my civil service life that I did applaud. The instructions and instruction manuals that were in use back in the 1960s were very good and clearly designed by people with a good understanding of what was needed for the then processes. While many processes were very painstaking and beset with apparently extra detail, logging they steps they were there for a reason and the resulting documentation was often very useful. Especially when an MP asked a question about something, when the documentation was worth its weight in gold. The other aspect of the rigid documentation approach was that very unskilled clerical staff could perform many of the tasks without step by step oversight while still creating clear audit trails.

The road traffic engineering screw-ups I mentioned earlier were created 15 years or so back, it might be a little more as it was before I retired and the pressure on staff costs was lower. So it might well have been in the 1990s. I remember as I used the road to get to work and every morning the carnage created was very apparent. It was probably a time of changeover none the less. The old guard who were on the cusp of retiring were probably used to a kinder less frenetic pace of life and traffic and the new younger element were incoming and knew that some changes were needed. The ‘national speed limit’ had been quite recently been reduced to 40 mph but the carnage had continued. Happily since that time the problems have reduced, ‘regression to the mean’ perhaps came into play? The last bad one was a very unwise character with two passengers rushing to the airport. A blindingly heavy rain storm swept in and while doing 60 in the 40 zone on bald rear tyres, (not simply illegal tread but bald) on his BMW he lost the rear end. It rear swung out, clipped the curb throwing the car sideways across the road into the path of a small Ford trapping and badly injuring its driver and halving the width of the BMW, one passenger was dead and the other had severe brain injuries. It all happened within feet of a neighbour walking to the bus stop, he considered that was his lucky day. Happily that was the last of the really bad RTAs in the area. Many of which were, (and the current crop of less serious incidents are still) are down to moments of pure silliness. Like the motor cyclist who overtook a line of traffic on a double white, came up behind a car that was turning right and managed to slide his bike under the side of the vehicle. Dented car sill, dented and scratched bike and wounded pride were the extent of the damages.

[Bob Williams]

My penultimate career was in Legal Services at a County Council HQ. I was retired on health grounds, which took them 14 months to decide: 14 months to add to the final payout (hello Council Tax). I loved the work, concerned with County Boundaries and Land purchases, it was very interesting and stimulated my brain at the time I had been out of work due to disability. But I seriously hated the place, the backbiting ethos and some of the people, who obviously thought of themselves as tinpot chiefs. The first (and last) to attempt to belittle me, paid the price of public humiliation and her colleagues realised that I cared nothing for their attitudes or their ‘position’. My refuge was to overstay at one of my tasks, which was taking the latest public newspaper ads to the Ads Pool. The place was full of black Nottingham lasses, the lasses were full of Nottingham humour and their coffee always hot. I really loved their company, they were a blue sky amongst miserable days.

Highways was on the same corridor and there were some very decent people there, but in Legal sevices there were some real plonkers.

When the Thought Police arrive at your door, think -
I'm out.

[Richard]

I can understand your experience. Back in the 1960s Asians had been kicked out of parts of Africa and came here. They were skilled business people and one ended up in my then office. To be fair he was very honest about most of his business affairs. he joined the Civil Service because he could more easily get a mortgage. He bought cheap properties, installed a ‘landlady’, rented rooms out on a ‘bed and breakfast’ basis but only generally to Irish labourers and the like because others would not take them. He admitted that how many shared a room or what else went on was the ‘lady lady’s’ affair as long as she paid him. Within a year or two he had a portfolio and less and less interest in the work.

My daughter worked for a while in a centre in the NHS, it was stuffed full of elderly cantankerous women many of whom were later encouraged to move on though not before my daughter went to another site in Cambridge to gain a promotion – and release from their ways. Errors had been a way of life there, a mistaken telephone message resulted in 40 people chasing their tails wondering why a patient was not already dead, my daughter read the hard copy report and realised that the phone message was clearly crap and slowly the panic happily not the patient died down as the error had suggested they would. (I should add that the error was so daft that it was like someone claiming a Morris Minor was clocked at 1500 mph.)

[dwynnehugh]

To try and get back to the original topic – I have never seen anything so stupid and dangerous in my life – and after 30 years in the police – I have seen a few!!

The idea is to prevent cars being parked on the pavements – great idea but with road these days barely wide enough to allow two car to progress in opposite directions on many high streets, the common sense options are:

Double yellow lines with enforcement.

Raised kerbs

Edited to include – cheap, short stay parking in towns

Lets assume ‘rectal cavity’ has parked his car on the pavement oblivious to the blind, mothers with prams, the disabled, normal pedestrians et all, the device doesn’t quite work in this instance as designed, so off drives ‘rectal cavity’. Half way home and travelling at a legal 70-mph limit – he suffers a front tyre blow out.

Careers across the road, colliding with or killing take yer pick:

Kids on way home from / on way to school

pedestrians

On coming vehicle, HGV or bus which takes evasive action (now read from top of this list)…….  need I say anymore?

Not that long ago something very similar happened in Glasgow when the driver of a refuse lorry had a funny turn at the wheel – how many were killed or seriously injured?

 

The more you meet people the more you understand why Noah took animals instead of humans

[Richard]

As I read it the objective was instant deflation rather than anything with s delayed action. Hollow needles half an inch or so in diameter should ensure a rapid loss of air pressure. Sadly there are some reverse engineered soles who may well not recognise the issue, they often appear on TV programmes.

[Ed P]

“Double yellow lines with enforcement”

Unfortunately these no longer seem to work since enforcement was taken away from the Police and handed over to District Councils.

If we are lucky our medium sized town gets one visit (for four hours) by the pair of Parking Enforcement Officers every two weeks during which time they are supposed to be enforcing No Parking/Double-yellows etc. over an area of approximately five square miles. The result is a complete flouting of any parking control as the fines*chances of getting caught sum does not come close to the savings through illegal parking. Only vehicle towing seems to work but there seems to be a dire shortage of such vehicles. As I have not even seen a beat policeman/PCSO in two years they cannot take any blame.

The nett result is that many will see vigilante-style equipment that automatically deters as being attractive despite the dangers that you have pointed out.

[Richard]

Men are not immune and from memory I believe their death rate is higher than that for women, though that could be because they ignore the issue for longer.

[The Duke]

I wonder if they would even work for run flats. I doubt it given they work by strengthened sidewalls. So these could be very dangerous, leaving a big hole in the face of the tyre and ultimately would destroy the structure of the tyre, if driven in without noticing at some speed.

It’s a non-starter from multiple danger angles.

Out local traffic wardens hang around our very busy hospital, picking of nin locals that don’t know they can’t park in a certain area of the road outside.

It’s very unfair, as unless you stop and ask one why they ticket that spot, you’d never know. Every day they ticket 50 plus people.

A scam.

[PlaneMan]

The main road near me has a very busy school that is being expanded at the moment, it’s always been bad for idiots parking stupidly but now the builders are taking up the less ridiculous spots as they start about 7-7.30am. So parents park on the yellow hashes/on the humped zebra crossing, completely on the pavement, facing the wrong way on the small one way system we have (clearly marked many times) and even on the turfed mini roundabout near my place which is about 2 1/2 foot tall.

The main reason for this is they just don’t give a F**k about other people. The police come maybe twice a year, despite the many near misses and minor incidents. They let almost everyone off with a warning because as one PCSO put it to me ‘we can’t do the paperwork and still do other things.’

The school did employ a ex-copper for a while, waving big flags and telling people to ‘fornicate off’, that was axed after there was no money available any more.

[Bob Williams]

In Louth there was once a ‘lady of a certain age’ who would park her aged Moggy Minor on any double yellows, quite often blocking off a bus route around our narrow streets. This was usually opposite the genuine, free parking places, which were of course on the ‘wrong side of the road’ to the shops she used. When the new Parking Enforcement team began work, she kept a growing collection of stuck-on tickets on her windscreen, as some sort of trophy, or possibly under the “ignore it and it does not exist” philosophy.

I was coming out of the newsagents one day when I heard a horrible screeching noise: the poor old Moggy had been clamped! She actually attacked the Enforcement Officer, so I bought a coffee from the newsagents’ machine and sat down on a bench to watch the fun. (Entertainment is rare in Louth except on Friday and  Saturday nights)

Eventually the EO escaped the handbagging and the Police turned up. Watching two burly young coppers trying to deal with the maniacal old girl without harming her, was wonderful fun. They called an ambulance: a male Paramedic was also struggling, until his large, formidable female colleague got out, strode over to the old lass and said right in her face “Get in the ambulance you old bat or I WILL HAVE YOU COMMITED!”

At that point I lost half my coffee and almost fell from my seat. But the old girl meekly climbed into the ambulance, gave her keys to an Officer and departed. One of the police officers drove her Moggy away, after the clamp was removed. I learned later that her licence was withdrawn and the Moggy sold to a guy who is restoring it. I hope it is not possessed by the spirit of the old gal, who passed last year.

Some Divine Providence sent me to a town where stuff like that occasionally happens.

 

When the Thought Police arrive at your door, think -
I'm out.

[dwynnehugh]

The point I was making was simply ‘the laws of unintended consequences’ – I can’t see this totally stupid and ill conceived contrivance even being taken up by the most inept council …….. or I might need to rephrase/reconsider that.

Anything that is designed to interfere with any vehicle’s safety must intrinsically be idiotic – even the police using their Stinger mats do so under strict conditions.

The more you meet people the more you understand why Noah took animals instead of humans

[Author]

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