May 22.10

What’s odd is that I’m still waiting for the phone call in which I’m begged to do the province a favor by calling all the shots this summer on road repair. On matters of ground transportation, I am the go-to guru guy.

As are you, probably.

We both drive, right?

Agreed, then. On potholes and broken pavement, we are of a shared expert view, namely: complain, moan, whine, bellyache, carp, gripe and bitch. Conversely, on summer road repairs, on detours and traffic rerouting, we rather tend to: bitch, carp, gripe, bellyache, whine, moan and  then complain.

Yet never do we professional motorists, upon noticing an obvious flaw in road work, pull over and offer our constructive criticism. Surely if we pranced up to the nearest churning earth-mover, waved frantically and shouted, “Oh, yoo-hoo! Mister Heavy Equipment Operator! Please stop your large machinery,” he would. Hands on our hips, eyeballs rolling in exasperation, it would be no great effort to inform the operator that all the work so far is wrong, wrong, wrong, that a single-lane squeeze to a left-turn exit makes no sense when a right-turn detour is clearly viable, and then to stomp away with hands flailing in the air for emphasis, like the hissy-pissy snit of a Broadway stage director who gets NO co-operation whatsoever. Most of us would be more inclined to stroll into a hospital operating theatre, bang on the glass and holler helpfully that the idiotic heart surgeon needs to shunt the anterior crucible BEFORE he sutures the gastronomic bivalve.

 And why? Selfishness. The extended hospitalization from advising on road repair would be ours, not the heart patient’s. Those earth-movers pack momentum.

I for one can longer keep my vast layman’s knowledge of road engineering solely to myself. Free advice (yes, free) is only a paragraph away.

First of all, personnel changes are needed. Whoever is in charge of erecting signs, barricades and traffic cones for a construction zone, he needs to swap jobs with the supervisor who schedules equipment and men for the site. Sign boss is a public works eager-beaver, every spring raring to go, his detours and warning signs erected days, weeks, sometimes months, before any semblance of work commences.

  Although one sign we could without is always the first posted and by far the largest, the bilingual billboard proclaiming “Canada’s Federal Economic Action Plan at Work Making Federally Planned Action,” at either entrance of the action-free zone. Not surprisingly, this is the same sign, in poster form, that taunts arrivals to the federal unemployment office. Do we really need to be reminded that a gift of our own tax dollars for cost-shared road repairs came from the level of government run by politicians who fly to work? Complete spending control on streets and highway ought to go to public officials who know their pink windshield washer from their blue _ first provincially, or, failing that, municipally, or, if need be, goldarnit, no more messing around, Sign Boss.

Pity the poor beggar. There he is, personally responsible for thousands of drivers every day pulling into single file and slowing to a crawl through the orange zone _ and all for practice, a heck of a feat in human make-believe, rivaling even Y2K and H1N1. Construction crews do eventually arrive, but just as mysteriously, a couple or three work days later, they disappear. Four hundred tons of heavy equipment and two dozen workers are portable, after all, not like some hefty plastic traffic cone.

I do not, however, agree with the popular suggestion that crews should stay put and work around the clock until the job is done. For starters, I personally would not want to do anything at 3 a.m., which is when, as a city resident, I sleep. My REEEMP-REEMP-REEEMP had best be an alarm clock, not the back-up warning of a dump truck.

And do we really want our roads built in the dark?

It’s already a government contract. Far better that detour be only temporary, summer-long, not inadvertently extended, permanently, to Medicine Hat.