Tis the Season for Construction
July 6, 2008
It has now been months since anyone's seen the Mahoning Ave bridge. To take the detour around the bridge, you have to take another road that's under construction and take a detour from THAT road to get back to the original road, and..ugh.
Street lights are off downtown at night. While they're renovating Federal Plaza to make more parking, there is much less parking. You can't use the "Party on the Plaza" space because of the window scare and its blocked off block all around Bdubs.
And all this comes at a time when they want to bring tourism and business downtown for the summer, phhtttt!
Actually the scariest area of construction around here at the moment is I-80 West past Niles. That's the part that gives you a death grip on the steering wheel because veering an inch to the left or right will either put you under a semi's 18 wheels or into an endless concrete barrier wall. Joy! That one hasn't made progress for years, I swear. Yes, i suppose we "need" overpasses and ramps, and that maybe I shouldn't complain or take the ODOT for granted but
WHEN THE HELL WILL THEY ACTUALLY GET IT ALL DONE!?
The answer is negative to infinity. It's called Ohio's Perpetual Construction Season. As soon as the weather breaks and the last snowturds have died out, an orange smattering starts to collect anywhere you typically like to drive. That awesome route you have mapped out to grandmas that gets you there in less than 10? No more! Grandma's gonna be waiting, waiting a loooong time for you to bring her groceries and foot cream.
Maybe more importantly: why do they do it? Seriously some of the places they smash to bits looked fine, so you gotta wonder if they're closing a gate to hell or burying nuclear waste or something. I pose a few theories:
The Falling Down Theory
"I want to know what's wrong with the street. See I don't think anything is wrong with the street, I think you're just trying to justify your inflated budgets. I know how it works. If you don't spend the money you had projected this year, they don't give the same amount next year. I want you to admit there's nothing wrong with this street. You're not going to hold us hostage with all these yellow lights and big trucks"
Overpopulation theory
Cones are actually an evolving, slow moving species, and are the offspring of barrels. Every year there's more and more of them WHY? Because we leave so many barrels out alone at night, unsupervised. Left within 5 feet of each other, the next day you will find a new pod of cones scattered in the street. GET RID OF THESE BARRELS! Stop letting them reproduce! Use the concrete barrier seperation technique!
Maybe the surplus of road cones is so bad, they've resorted to burying them under the roads because there's no more room in the landfills. These are dark times indeed we live in...
The Misused Storage Theory
Well where do you think the ropes, flashy light things, cones and barrels are put the other 6 months of the year? They are in storage...at summer camps. Why there, you might ask? Well this construction production company has to keep up with their quota or they'll lose funding so, there's just no place to put the garish neon products after construction season is over.
If they are kept anywhere within daylight viewing people assume it is a place of construction, and the workers assume they're to start ripping up the area with fun loud machinery. So the orange things have to be taken, deep into the woods, where it's dark and there are few to witness...
And then shit, April rolls around again and the kids have got to go *somewhere* when school is out, so the camp directors demand the stacks and stacks of barrels be removed from the cabins so we can store our kids there for a few months...dumptruck after dumptruck come in to take the orange monstrosities away and back to the streets, and in their desperation to unload their weight some get thrown out along highways (every 10 yards or so) or around your favorite intersection in town. But they have to be put somewhere.
I say we destroy the excess orange! Go out in the night and put them out of their miserable existance! For god's sake spay and neuter your barrels!
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ah karen, you make me laugh.
i have been enjoying watching drunk girls leave the core and fall into sewage-filled holes in the street. giant heels makes this even more fun.
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The worst part is there's no staggering of the construction projects so that the businesses trying to get by can stay healthy. I feel for the poor folks at the Boxcar lounge at the bottom of the bridge that's been closed forever. Out of sight, out of mind!
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