Sunday, May 10, 2009

Adding to the problems

If street sweeping trucks are sent out during the morning peak traffic time they're worsening the traffic jams.

But it's a regular event.

This morning at 8.30 there was a lengthening queue of us caught up behind this dust-creator...



There's regular chaos on Al Wasl Road too, morning peak traffic being the time they send the gardeners out with their waste collection trucks blocking one lane.

Traffic congestion costs businesses in Dubai, according to our beloved RTA, several billion dirhams a year. Not to mention frustration and drivers suddenly having to change lanes, both recipes for a crash.

Just a suggestion. Why not send the trucks out to block the roads before and/or after the peak times?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I know the answer to your question.

The answer is that the employees of these trucks and service providers don't see a reason for changing there working hours and they don't belive in doing things at night or other less peak time.
Also there must be some one in the municipulity or cleaning authourity of that particuler place who think he needs to get active becaues they have been sleeping on cleaning the city like the old days and he is showing off today by a dust making machine.

ZeTallGerman said...

I was also stuck in traffic this morning on the road going past Dubai Festival City into Deira (Al Rebat Street) The municipality workers decided that 7:50am would be the perfect time to close one off two lanes in order for them to cut back the palm trees, dropping frongs onto the road, etc. Thank you very much. It was very helpful indeed.

Seabee said...

ZTG, yep, that's the gardeners I'm talking about - clipping palm fronds, collecting the old dead flowers and grass clippings. Doing the right thing by recycling it all, so they carefully collect it in a very big truck which blocks at least one lane. All very commendable. But no-one in the management team seems to have worked out that sending them to do it in peak traffic time just might add to the road problems.

James said...

I guess they should be out cracking the whip at 12 noon making these poor guys clear up the clippings in the mid-day sun, or perhaps at 12 midnight by the light of the moon? When exactly is the perfect twenty minute slot to try to get all of Dubai's public areas tidy?

"But no-one in the management team seems to have worked out that sending them to do it in peak traffic time just might add to the road problems."

You think they consciously choose peak times to send them out or do you actually think they're out there all the time, working 12 hour shifts for tens of dirhams a day?

It also mystifies me why many of the construction worker's shifts end around 8am and 5.30pm thus clogging up the roads with the dirty great buses ferrying them back to their squalid pits. Don't they understand they're second-class citizens and their lives should revolve around 'us'.

Seabee said...

Do think before you make childish, ill-informed and patronising comments James. And do try to stay with the subject.

The subject is not the treatment of workers, nor what they're paid nor whether outdoor work involves being in the sun.

The subject is traffic congestion, which the RTA is working hard and expensively to reduce because of its cost to Dubai's economy. Three days ago Mattar Al Tayer said the RTA has been able to reduce Dubai’s losses in traffic congestion from 5.9 billion dirhams to 4 billion dirhams.

There are tasks such as road sweeping and garden clippings removal which if carried out on the main roads during peak times add to the cost of doing business in the city. They can be done just as well but much more efficiently for the city outside of peak hours, the work can be done on non-main roads during peak times, or on the opposite side to the traffic flow.

The road sweeping trucks are air-conditioned, so your colonial 'working in the midday sun' attitude is a nonsense.

As for the clippings collection, this morning at nine, for example, the piles of flowers removed from the gardens along Al Sufouh Road were at the roadside awaiting the truck - which would therefore be arriving after peak time.

I didn't remotely suggest that they conciously send the trucks out to block peak traffic, what I said is that they haven't thought it through, they haven't thought about the effects on traffic congestion.

It has nothing to do with what the workers are paid or what the temperature is and nothing to do with 'them and us', although that seems to be uppermost in your mind.

It has to do with good management,with looking at the bigger picture for the more efficient operation of the city.

Your sarcasm about the labourer buses is equally ill-informed. There's pressure for companies to stagger working hours to reduce congestion, the RTA is working with companies on ways to move their staff more efficiently, but the labourer buses coming and going at peak times is indeed adding to the congestion. To change the shift times wouldn't involve the labourers in any extra inconvenience nor more unpleasant working conditions. Those are separate issues.

The time schedules and routes is nothing to do with the operators of the vehicles - and how you relate that to their living conditions is way beyond me - but is a management decision. I'm complaining about bad management not about the workers.