The show on the road

My neighborhood is being torn down, and my mood is going up. Or maybe it’s the other way around. My city ran a surplus this year, so the municipal council took a good look at their spending habits and kicked them into overdrive.

The council’s philosophy is that if we don’t use the surplus, we’ll have a perfectly spendable pile of money just sitting there. Sitting there! Can you imagine what the other city councils would say? “Those babies can’t even overrun a budget. Amateurs!” Setting money on fire has gone out of fashion everywhere but the highest orders of government.



So my city has decided to blow everything on construction. The theory is that since construction never ends, it can siphon away the whole surplus and then some. Sure, it’ll cause traffic jams, but that just means people will spend more time outside.

What’s not to like? The extra money will improve the roads and public health. In government terms, that’s what’s called a win-win. Or so they tell the taxpayers.

Now my completely functional sidewalk is being torn up. Meanwhile, one street over, there are potholes that swallow cars. Interestingly enough, the repairs have ensured that I can no longer use my sidewalk.

I have to go in the road, rappel down the side of one pothole, then climb up the other side. All while avoiding falling cars. It’s made the morning commute much livelier, especially when the buses get going.

But the construction isn’t all bad for me. Apart from the exercise I got clambering around potholes, I also refamiliarized myself with my neighbors. When the construction workers smooth down a new sidewalk plate, everyone in my neighborhood competes to put their initials in it.

I’ve seen faces I haven’t seen in years pressed to the windows, waiting for the construction guys to leave before cueing a stampede to smack handprints into the wet cement. This is fantastic news for the council, because if a sidewalk plate has marks in it, that obviously means it cannot be walked on and must be replaced. Again.

In America, the streets are paved with my tax dollars. Of course, before a plate can be replaced, the council has to hire someone to inspect it. The construction people aren’t allowed to do it.

If they did inspections, it’d cost too little. The inspectors wear yellow vests. They stare at the road.

They stare at the sky. They walk very slowly. They’re paid by the hour.

I’ve done a bit of inspecting around my neighborhood, though I didn’t charge anyone to do it. There’s a sidewalk plate a few steps from my house with a set of dog prints through it. A half-mile down the road, another one shows three names and a scrawled date: 1993.

I hope they don’t disappear. But at the rate my neighborhood’s being worked over, it’s only a matter of time. Still, I’ve got one thing going for me.

In a few days, the council will tour the neighborhood to see how construction is coming along. If I’m lucky, they’ll fall down a pothole..