Am I the only one who finds it weird, and a bit dumb, that city workers tend to patch concrete sidewalks with whatever spare asphalt they happen to find?
It's a small thing, for sure, but if you're going to be out in the sun and heat patching sidewalks anyway, working with the idea that people will find them easier to walk and ride on, why use asphalt? It's consistency is very different from concrete, and the rocks that compose it tend to break lose over time - or from the start - and leave a patch I can only describe as dumb.
It's like mending a silk dress with denim.
Perhaps it's a budget thing. Mostly, it just seems kinda inexplicable.
2 comments:
The arrow indicates that they plan on charging the property owner to do a replacement of the sidewalks. The asphalt patch is this stuff one can get at Home Depot, intended to provide a temporary fix for cracks in asphalt or concrete, not a permanent fix.
The city, as you may have heard about lately, is kinda broke. A lot of departments are focusing on revenue-positive activities (things that make the city money instead of costing it money) and one of those activities is charging assessments for new sidewalks. Basically there are crews going through town marking where sidewalks need to be fixed for ADA and general reduced liability purposes, and then informing the property owner that they have to re-do their sidewalks. Sidewalks are considered public right-of-way but private property--so the owner of the property has to pay for their repair, and the city decides when and how they have to be repaired.
The property owner can either have the city's contractor do the sidewalk repair, or find another city-approved contractor to do the repair. Either way, the city gets a (small) cut, staff stays busy, and a job that got put off for a lot of years (sidewalk repair) gets taken care of during a lull in city projects.
That's good news, wburg...unless, of course, one happens to be a property owner, which I am.
But I guess that means that the sidewalks in my neighborhood will one day become ADA compliant? That'd be nice....
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