For two days now, a bunch of “Breakfast Roll Men” are in charge of the traffic at the junction of Dodder park Rd and Rathfarnham Road. I’m not certain what time they start but they were there at 10:00am yesterday (6th Nov) and still there at 4:00pm. There at 12:00noon today.
This junction is a bit of a nightmare for traffic at the best of time but to say that these guys were making a complete mess of it is an understatement (FUBAR is the correct expression). It looks like their important task is to remove and replace the road markings and as anyone who suffers at the hands of these kind of contractors will know, traffic management would not be one of the qualifications of the job.
Scruffy high vis jacket wearing employees (jacket suitably covered in a year’s road work detritus ) manning the “Stop Go” signs. A phone call to the local Garda station in Rathfarnham to advise of the chaos elected a hands in the air response of “ not much we can do about it”
I’m not certain who is responsible for this piece of total disregard for the citizens who have to traverse this junction. Dodder Park Road is the boundary between Dublin City Council and South Dublin County Council.
Travelling onwards towards the city we are now at the junction of Rathmines Rd upper and Lower, (12:20) where a contractor has parked his truck on the bend just past the bus stop at Lenehans and surrounded it with cones. This means the road at the traffic lights is now down to one lane. The truck is not serving any purpose, it is just the most convenient place from them to park it while they work on the footpath at the traffic lights around the corner at the junction of Charleston Road.
This is definitely in the responsibility of Dublin City Council.
Remember the eyesore and absolute chaos that was caused when a contractor was allowed to use O’Connell Street as a storage depot for all of their materials while upgrading the central median. Material which was then gleefully used by a bunch of thugs protesting against the DUP.
It is totally unacceptable that the traffic in a city of 1.2m people can be controlled at will by any contractor with a bunch of traffic cones and some labourers decked out in yellow high vis vests.
Invariably, it is not the senior manager on the site who is given the job of messing up the traffic, more likely it is the guy who looks after the shovels and other important implements at the start and end of the day. When two or three of them are needed, it’s like watching the Irish team under Trapattoni trying to pass the ball to each other.
Why the hell do our councils not include a requirement to have professional traffic management expertise as part of any RFQ for road works in the Dublin area.
Remember, we are about to have the heart of the city dug up to facilitate the joining up of the Green and Red Luas Lines, is the traffic management at the various sites along the route going to be controlled by whatever “Breakfast Roll Man” happens to be to hand?
There is definitely a sense of nobody being in charge where road works in this city are concerned.