WHILE I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION: Charles Bannerman bemoans the eternal digging up of roads and pavements in Inverness
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George Bernard Shaw once claimed that to achieve an idea of eternity, the English invented cricket. In Inverness we do this differently. We install fibre optic cables instead.
No matter how carefully we contrive to avoid temporary traffic lights presiding over frequently abandoned holes in streets and pavements, we inevitably discover that fresh ones have sprung up with all the persistence of a rampant dose of chickenpox. I can certainly see no system.
They’ve been at it for so long, I sometimes forget why they’re doing it. I just hope it’s all worth what have become years of disrupted city travel and pavements with infinite black stripes.
Inverness’s fixation with digging up the streets isn’t new and was one of the first things my mother noticed on arriving here in the 1950s. They do it incessantly and some thoroughfares, like Drummond and Culduthel roads, are seldom free of “temporary” lights and abandoned holes. And when one lot eventually fill their trenches in, reinforcements arrive to start afresh. Some Inverness streets have little original surface left.
When works for various utilities need to be done, why not perform them in a way that minimises inconvenience?
For instance, should these highly profitable utility companies not be obliged to work as close to 24/7 as doesn’t disturb local residents, hence reducing the length of disruption by a half or two-thirds? And look at the desperately poor reinstatements gas, electricity, telephone and sundry other companies have left behind them across years and decades.
These patches are now, literally, coming apart at the seams and steadily evolving into the plethora of potholes that top so many residents’ complaint lists. Just take Bruce Gardens from a long, long litany. It’s like No Man’s Land at the Battle of the Somme. So whoever put speed bumps in Bruce Gardens – were they having a laugh? These actually make the street flatter!
Ask the council about such problems (which this newspaper fairly recently did) and they’ll swiftly try to pass the buck to the utility companies. Out of the council’s hands, it seems.
So if the council has so little control over street excavation, how come a supervisor, with whom I went out to remonstrate about tearing up holes 20 yards from my bedroom window at 2am, could also tell me that the council forbids Sunday working, which would speed contracts up hugely.
Highland Council have since confirmed (apart from rare emergencies) this anachronistic Sabbatarianism which has already added months to the cable laying misery alone.
So it seems the council can exercise control when they like.
No Sunday working is complete nonsense, since Sunday is the quietest day on the roads.
One way or another the council’s role – or lack of it – in mitigating the effect of these eternal excavations needs seriously examined.
It’s high time the council held utility companies’ feet to the fire and obliged them to perform these operations not only in minimum time but also to reinstate them to a much higher quality.
Meanwhile, we await the legacy of the miles of trenches currently, and apparently indefinitely, being dug in our pavements and streets and just wonder how many more potholes and moonscapes the resulting erosion will lead to in the decades to come.
