Why the Monaro is more efficient than Ottawa

In 1990-91 we had the great pleasure of living in Ottawa, Ontario.  One of our Canadian friends commented that there are two seasons in Canada: Winter and roadworks.

I have come to the conclusion that the Local Governments of the Monaro are 50% more efficient than that, having reduced the number of seasons to 1: roadworks!  I cannot remember the exact dates but it seems that for more than 50% of the time there has been one major set of roadworks between Carwoola and Queanbeyan CBD.

The current lot are on Captains Flat Rd (CFR) and run for about 1200m from Briars - Sharrow Rd to the bridge over Whiskers Creek (thus blocking the entrance to Widgiewa Rd.  We were originally told this would start in late May and run for about 6-8 weeks.  This was good as we would miss 4 weeks of this through being on vacation.  This was situation a few days after we returned.

Looking from Widgiewa down to Briars - Sharrow.
At least they were working:
On 18 July I took another photograph, at the Nothern end of the work) to show the size of the kit being employed and also to marvel at the angle at which the bulldozer was working!


It did not look like this was going to be finished anytime soon.  On ringing Palerang Council a very pleasant staff member had the chutzpah to tell me that it would take another 4 to 6 weeks.  When questioned as to why it had at least a 50% over-run he said that there had been some rain, and they had met some 'technical issues'.  He was a nice bloke, and did give me a straight answer, so I didn't ask him:
  1. what allowances they had made in their project planning for these events - hardly unexpected, especially the rain; and/or
  2. why they were at least a week late in starting the work; and/or
  3. given that things were so obviously running late why the workers were allowed to take their Registered Day Away on 11 July!
The really, really frustrating bit is that Queanbeyan City Council spent about a month in April-May working on part of CFR about 10km closer to the start of the road.  After all of that effort all that seemed to have happened was that the hard shoulder had been widened.  In my book it is London to a brick that they will resume their efforts as soon as Palerang finishes this bit.

The really, really annoying thing is the inescapability of this.  As we found in Tanzania if roads aren't maintained/upgraded to fit the traffic load one soon ends up with a good bitumen road turning into a dirt goat-track.  Of course, in Tanzania I didn't have a blog on which to grizzle and thus spread my grief atround!

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