Monsters and Mayhem

Reading the title, one may conclude that this article could be one of the following; (a) a very early announcement of a Halloween event in North Carolina, or (b) a review of an adult fiction book of the same name.  Fear not petrolheads, for this is neither of the two.  This is all about the unchecked activities of haulers and other monster-sized vehicles.

Living in one of those places where only a tiny two-lane, sidewalk-less road is our only access to the main roads, it is difficult enough to have to squeeze an AUV between your neighbor’s road-encroaching wall and the tricycle that is coming from the other direction.  It is also bad enough that most of you are crowding the road during rush hour.  But what makes it worse is when “thinking they are smart” truck drivers will use those teeny-tiny streets to get from point A to point B because they are not allowed to use the major thoroughfares during the times specified in the truck ban.

I have seen yellow dump trucks, blue transporters with full-sized backhoes as their cargo, a few white cement mixers and some semi tricks with twenty to forty foot containers in tow using our dainty little roadway to bypass the main highway so they can get to the other side of the city.  Not only do they cause a problem for most motorists as their size makes them occupy more than half of the entire road, they also cause horrendous traffic as their heights pose a risk to the absurdly low hanging electrical, cable tv and telco wires.  These monsters move ever so slowly forward as their pole lackeys push these dangling wires out of the way.

I don’t know who the real genius was behind the idea of using these back roads as access routes but, I am pretty sure they were dumb enough not to realize that these small roads were not built to withstand the weight of these lumbering monsters.  I mean, in paper they were designed to be.  But we all know how these kinds of “taxpayer money” projects work.  Plus, not the entire stretch of road was cemented.  I mean, in the proposal submitted by its contractor it is supposed to be.  But with twenty-percent of the budget absorbed by this invisible entity called SOP, only around sixty-percent of the road was rehabilitated.  That leaves fory percent of the road still covered in asphalt.  And knowing how weak these “taxpayer money” asphalt roads are, the once smoothly-paved, pre-election asphalt roads now have craters in them that will allow the gods to play sungka on our roads.

We know business is business and any delay caused by the late arrival of equipment and materials to the jobsite is costly.  We also know that there is something called foresight.  For the dingbat handling the deployment of these behemoths, this means that the truck ban only covers around four hours in the morning and four hours in the afternoon.  Anytime prior to or after that is the best time to schedule the transport of your much needed supplies.  You don’t need an engineering degree to figure that out.

One may argue that force majeure and Murphy’s Law will always come into play, hence the off-schedule transport.  True, but force majeure doesn’t happen everyday.  Regarding their excuse and using Murphy’s Law, yes it can happen.  And it happened the moment you dingbats were born.