How not to mend a road

In these past weeks of seeing Arran cut in half by road works on the String, questions must be asked about how these things can be done better. Nobody doubts that the men working on an upgrade of the road surface are doing a good job – but communication with the public has been abysmal. As so often in this increasingly privatised age, we are seeing an ‘outsourced’ company put in charge of how to provide a residual way for people to continue their lives while effectively cut off from the rest of the community. Convoy systems have alternated unpredictably with traffic lights and often left blank periods when neither was available, even though the road looked perfectly capable of taking one-lane traffic.

In the old days when Councils employed their own work squads, members of the public at least knew what number to phone and ask for information. The privatised approach declares itself cheaper and more efficient, but there are countless points at which this must be questioned. Paying for the High School, for instance, will continue for many years, having been based on a ‘partnership’ funding scheme which was in fact the most expensive way to borrow money. Several generations of children will have grown up and have children of their own before the building and its maintenance ceases to be in private, profit-making hands. Many of us suspect that road contracts are similarly lucrative for private firms, whose employees do not see communication with the public as a necessary part of their job. The whole operation has too often verged on a lunacy reminiscent of Chaplin’s Modern Times.