Twis fab in Cork...they have redone the markings and added traffic lights to two of the roundabouts on the South Link Road, the Sarsfield road roundabout and the Bandon Road roundabout. Both of these are classic X type roundabotu with the 4 roads intersecting at 90 degrees to each other.
but the legends in the council have made a joke of them, esp the Bandon road roundabout. In fact i saw recently on the paper that since they did the new markings, the number of accidents has shot up and they are now going back to reconsider what to do.
An example: they made the hard shoulder on one appraoch into a third lane. So you had a left hand lane(former hard shoulder), middle lane and right hand lane. They decided to paint on a LEFT turning arrow into the midle lane. So most people going straight on were in the left hand lane,as this is the way it had been for circa 10 years+, and you had a few lost lonely souls in the middle lane turning left according to their arrow. So of course you had the middle lane cutting in front of the left lane, cue uproar, roaring shouting and for the unlukcy ones a large dent.
they had to send their crew back out to burn off the left arrow in the middle lane.
I'll tell you, for anyone who uses the Bishopstown area in Cork there is a full time job in road markings and their rmeoval a week or two later. Over the last three months they have been painting on and taking back off white road marjkings every few weeks. I mean, no wonder councils have no money. its a catasphroe.
heres one just as good. Woodies in Cork recently moved 500 yards and as a consequence they changed the traffic lights at the new junction they created. previoslu to this it had been a T junction, but with a new road into the new Woodies its now a crossroads. On one of the approach roads there had always been a left filter arrow, which was green 75% of the time at least. Never traffic build up, worked very well. As part of the new junction they took away the filter. i finally snapped the other day and rang the traffic lights people in Cork City Council.
Check this out. the contractor who did the Woodies was the one who was allowed change the lights and noone in the Council realised until weeks later that the filter was gone. So the council have put in a 'request' to the contractors from Woodies to sort it out. in fact the council 'thought' it had been done until I assured the guy it wasn't done.
So 2 questions.
Why was Joe Punter contractor even allowed touch those traffic lights without a Council Engineer being present?
If they did balls it up, as the Engineer told me, why didn't the council immediatly fix it themselves and send the bill for doing it to the contractor??
I mean, someone reassure me here, but are the people who make these decisions in Councils just stupid or is there a more complex explantion?
Because i could spend 2 or 3 hours detailing disasters they have done in Cork just within the last 6 months alone. And in most instances they had to come back out and undo the messed up work and redo it a different way or in fact just put it back the way it used be. So much money wasted. I mean, its just insane like.