Editorial
Waste of money in the street
Somebody must be held responsible
Adivider is supposed to be an aid to traffic management, not a public tormentor. It is an elongated fixed part of a road constructed to assist two-way traffic. But we are making it, albeit bemusedly, movable -- or shall we say, removable! The cruel joke does not stop short there -- the once-removed concrete shards are having to be put back again on the wrecked mid-section of the road. The case in point is the on-going, off-going demolition-cum-restoration work on the Airport Road. When the breaking of the quarter of a kilometer divider had been in progress, the public rued it as experts openly questioned the purpose behind such demolition activity. It had to be a prime ministerial directive to stop the dismantling. For, the idea of dismantling dividers was linked to having new, wider dividers with all its obvious implications. This sounded untenable on grounds of narrowing down the thoroughfares oblivious of traffic load on them, let alone a huge waste of public money it entailed. The alternating demolition and restoration works are basically wasteful, whichever way one looks at it. Give the commuters a break, the government must. The latter owe it to the public to get to the bottom of playing around with the dividers in the name of streamlining traffic and beautifying the city. The criticism or admonishing will not be enough; some heads must roll and people made answerable for their ill-conceived, unplanned actions.
|
|
