OT - Rant about Councils

[John]

My council has just stated it is looking for consultants to review what people are putting in their wheelie bins!

My annoyance is that councils up and down the country are probably wasting money on similar initiatives - but are acting like commercial competitors in not sharing - or seeking to share this type of information.

A bit like when I recently searched for some technical information and found that several councils had all drawn up from first principles the process of installing a traffic sign. Beautiful drawings - but substantially the same - all done by councils with a silo mentality.

[jgharston]

Grrr ditto. I used to be on the Environment Working Group of the local council, for some time I documented my waste just we could have a bit of real-world sample data. It had never occured to anybody before to do this, everybody was talking about getting the binmen to look in peoples' bins. A bit of it is at

[Vortex7]

IMO The only way these organisations can ever become efficient is through merger with neighbours. Unless there are true economies of scale they will forever be stitched up by the waste contracting companies (Veolia and the like) and ultimately we pay extra the more complex the waste collection process becomes. Of course don't expect the Civil Service Unions to ever see it that way....

[geraldthehamster]

What have the Civil Service Unions got to do with local councils?

Cheers Richard

[Nightjar]

I would be surprised if people in different parts of the country put exactly the same things in their wheelie bins, so this is one area where local studies probably are necessary.

Are you sure they simply had not extracted the relevant parts of Chapter

1 of the Traffic Signs Manual and put them into a form that was easy to distribute to a work detail?

That is what we did with Chapter 8 when I worked for an Electricity Board as much of the chapter dealt with situations most work gangs would not come across and they had trouble enough putting the signs out properly even with a boiled down summary to work from.

Colin Bignell

[Chris J Dixon]

Indeed so.

I reckon the most misunderstood pair of signs are "Oncoming vehicles have priority" and "You have priority over oncoming vehicles", especially amongst workers deploying signs around road works.

I have seen works protected by identical pairs of signs of either the above types.

On chatting with the men, at a location which was signed so as to advise drivers approaching from both directions that they had priority, they were convinced that they had done it right, and showed me the comprehensive printout showing them exactly what they had to do. Unfortunately, they failed to appreciate how important it was to have _precisely_ what the sheet showed, not merely something similar, because that was all they had on their wagon.

Circles give orders, triangles warn and rectangles inform. There is, sadly, little understanding of these important distinctions.

Chris

[Tim Streater]

So who would be liable if two people dinged each other?

[Roger Chapman]

Both. Having right of way is not a licence to drive into anyone who impedes it if it is possible to avoid a collision. Whether they were equally liable would depend on whether the rest of the road layout conformed with a halt line painted on the side without priority passage.

[Another Dave]

I used to produce software for Local Authorities. Every one of them wanted (different) expensive modifications. All it did was record sundry debts - rents for village halls, rubbish collection etc.

Another Dave

[jgharston]

NOBODY expects the Civil Service Unions! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise....

(I'm sorry, the temptation was just SOOO huge!)

JGH

[Chris J Dixon]

I guess that both drivers would be equally culpable, with the excuse that the signing was wrong. The signs are supposed to allocate priority, but if you drive towards another moving vehicle, you still need to accept the consequences of your action.

Chris

[The Natural Philosopher]

If all the consultants were requited to sort the waste into piles for a week, it would do them good. help recycle it, and probably we wouldn't need to know anyway.

Or get all the jobless to do it as a condition of being on Soshul.

[Nightjar]

That is why we ended up sending an engineer around to check on any new road works. Literacy was never a requirement for getting a job digging holes in roads.

Colin Bignell

[Nightjar]

I suspect that liability for payment would end up with the utility's public liability insurers.

Colin Bignell

[Tim Streater]

Hmmm, thanks for the lawyers' answers, guys, but I would have thought anyone would have a reasonable expectation that, if they approach a situation where the signage indicates they have priority, they would continue on in the expectation that the other klod is going to come to a halt so they can go through. By the time both realise the other is not going to, it may be too late.

If your lawyers' replies had any merit, we could scrap all signage and road marking tomorrow, as well as cats eyes, and the special road surface that grips much better that you see on some bends.

[Andy Burns]

Oh they share all right, or should I say plagiarise?

When I noticed they were about to convert a local car park to pay & display, I downloaded the "Parking Strategy" document from Blaby District Council's web site, only to find that the embedded title of the PDF file was actually "Mid Sussex Parking Strategy", a quick search of that council's website turned up a document with largely similiar chunks.

[Roger Chapman]

The situation visually is no different to driving along a single track road. You just don't let the approaching traffic get so close that you can't stop in time.

You asked who would be liable. Colin suggests the council would be held responsible but as devil's advocate for the council I think the car insurers would split the bill and penalise the drivers for carelessness even if they didn't get done for lack of due care and attention.

There are still roads in this country that lack adequate signage and luxuries such as cat's eyes and road markings. OK so a wrong sign is a special case but the scenario is really no different to what must happen from time to time when some bozo misinterprets the proper signage. The plod is not going to look on the driver with priority with any favour if he didn't make a determined attempt to avoid an accident.

[Mike Barnes]

John :

Isn't that sharing the kind of thing that the Local Government Association (or something like it) should be co-ordinating?

[Andrew May]

Nightjar wrote: That is why we ended up sending an engineer around to check on any new

I'm not sure that numeracy is a requirement for getting a job painting road markings either. There is a village near where I work that has had a 30mph speed limit through it for as long as I have known it. Last month the council sent someone around to put red paint on the road on the way in to the village and paint the speed limit on it in white. It seems quite common nowadays. So, the painting team, sitting right next to the 30mph sign painted a big 40 on the road. Duh.

Andrew

[Tim Streater]

Single trackish roads, of which there are many in this area (with high hedges and bends, just for grins, too), are a bit different in that you know you'll both have to manoeuvre to get past each other, so you both slow down to see how to effect that.

Possibly if its roadworks, you might be right.

Depends, seems to me. If I'm on the priority road, and the bozo drives straight out from the joining road and smashes into the side of me (because he thought that the give-way triangle meant "accelerate now") then I'd take a very dim view if I was held in any way responsible.