Under construction
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Next year the 2012 Olympic Games are coming to the UK. In preparation, cities across the country are preparing for the arrival of hundreds of athletes and thousands of supporters by getting dug up. New venues are being built, existing ones are being revamped and major infrastructure routes to, from and through many cities are being changed or renewed to join them all together.
As I write this, the city I live in is a building site. It has been for a while now. In the last year, there have been back to back periods where huge sections of major roads throughout the city centre have been closed, often for a period of months, while construction work is completed. As soon as one section is finished, another is started and the pattern of inconvenience shifts somewhere else.
One would expect the results of all this change to have a positive outcome. Thus far, however, I have yet to see any improvement. Whole sections can be closed off for weeks or even months at a time and it's difficult to track how work on any individual site is going. Many of them show very little change from one day to the next. It's not uncommon to have an entire road fenced off for weeks only for the fences to be removed at the end and there to be no visible difference whatsoever.
The disruption, while annoying, is something one can get used to over time. And there is after all plenty of time. It’s anyone's guess as to which route my bus will take through the city centre these days, but providing the route it takes is the same once it is through the building site, I don't mind. On a few occasions where an old route has been reopened, some of the changes have even turned out to be quite nice.
Unfortunately, however, not all of the work seems worthwhile. For those sites where there has actually been a visual change, it's sometimes questionable as to whether that change was really needed. The most recent changes have seen the traffic lights removed from two very busy cross road junctions, turning them into dangerous free-for-alls. The only bright sides I can see are that the block paving around them looks quite good and when the inevitable happens, there will be ample space for the ambulances to park.
Several years ago we dug up and re-laid the front garden at home. We completely changed the layout of it from a winding path with a lawn to a geometric pattern of tiers and raised flower beds with paving throughout. The areas being worked on in Coventry are much larger than our garden, but if the number of fluorescent jackets on display is anything to go by, the man-power per square metre of land probably isn’t that far off. It took three of us the best part of a weekend to do the garden and the improvement was visible straight away.
There is plenty of time before the Olympics to fill in all of the holes that have been dug in Coventry. And when the fences are gone, we might even discover that some of those holes were worth digging. But something tells me that so long as there is good money to be made from digging holes there will be enough of them to last right up until the deadline.