Here they go again

I just don't understand the thought process.

If there is any thought.

It's something I've posted about many times, the constant digging up of work which has just been finished.

Here's an example, just one of many in Dubai Marina.

For the past couple of years they've been erecting the building. The usual thing, a messy construction site behind a tatty plywood fence.

The exterior work is finished, the fence comes down. They send in a team to tidy it all up and lay the footpath pavers.

A week after it's all finished they send in another team to dig a bloody great hole in the footpath.



Why leave it until the pavers are laid?

Why not dig the hole and do whatever they need to do while it's still a patch of sand?

Money wasted by lack of planning

Back in March/April there were several press reports of the billions owed to UK contractors by Dubai government-related companies, discussions at ministerial level etc.

Inevitably it isn't just UK companies owed money and The National has now reported that unsurprisingly Japanese builders are in the same position with billions owed to them.

I've made the point several times in the past that it's a disaster for Brand Dubai, for Dubai's reputation as a reliable place to do business, a threat to Dubai's commercial plans for the future, so I won't repeat myself.

But I will repeat myself about the huge wastage of money caused by a lack of planning. If so many billions weren't wasted there'd be more money available to pay bills.

Yesterday for the first time in a few months I drove onto Road 611 from Al Sufouh Road, over the interchange which crosses SZR.

611 is a new road, this section was finished not very long ago.

Now it looks like this:





A big section being dug up, diversions in place, a road junction being replaced by a flyover.

Population projections, tourist arrival projections, traffic density and projections were all available yet must have been ignored because what was obviously an inadequate road plan was created, approved and built.

Not only billions wasted but it causes unnecessary extra pollution, traffic jams, lost productivity and driver frustration.

All because not enough competent thought was given to planning.

And this is just one of many examples all over the city.




Japanese contractors owed billions by Dubai firms.

Oz, land of extremes

Over the years I've often told visitors who ask about the weather, what to wear, what to look out for, that Australia is a land of extremes.

Partly the weather is different in different parts of the country due to it being a hell of a long way from north to south. The far north is way up towards the equator so is wet tropics while the far south has nothing but water between it and Antarctica.

But it's not only that, we really do get extremes at the same time in roughly the same area.

When we went back in February for a couple of weeks we flew into Sydney and then drove north into Queensland to the Sunshine Coast just north of Brisbane.

I couldn't finalise the trip until a couple of days before we were ready to go because the area we'd be driving through had floods and bushfires.

See what I mean about extremes.

By the time we were ready to set off the fires were under control. We were planning to visit friends living in Bellingen, pop 3,000, who were cut off by floodwater but fortunately the access roads became passable the day before we arrived.

The prompt for this post is that in today's Aussie papers there's news that the same areas of the mid-north coast have again been declared natural disaster zones because of flooding.

Bellingen is isolated again by floods. The Bellinger River peaked at 7.2 metres so it broke its banks, brought bridges down, cut roads.

Why do people live in such areas?

It's beautiful country:


Photo: bellingermagic.com

The town had 351mm of rain in the 48 hours to early this morning - over a foot in the old money.

The access roads look like this:


Photo: Nerrida Johnson. ABC

At the same time the Rural Fire Service in NSW is listing fourteen bush and grass fires on its current Incidents List.

Worthy Thingamy safely installed.

I wasn't aware in advance that your car won't be registered unless it comes equipped with a Trigonal Baffle-Board.

A Trigonal Baffle-Board?

Don't panic about it if your car's soon to be re-registered though, they're on sale when you take the car in for inspection.

State of the art, technologically advanced yet they cost only Dh30. And they look like this:



Well, like this when they're twisted into shape:



It's not only a Worthy Thingamy, amazingly, it Protects The Whole Shoot.

I know this from the helpful information on the box.

Dubai's demise

Three things prompted this post, a conversation and two experiences.

The conversation was a visiting UK businessman saying the other evening that we in Dubai are unaware of the bad situation we're in. We're not exposed to the truth as presented by the press in the UK so we don't realise that the city's economy has collapsed.

Hmmm.

Firstly, we are of course fully aware of what the world's media says - we have access to it on the internet.

Secondly, while there's been a dramatic slowdow it's not the picture conjoured up by sections of the British press. You know the stories, tens of thousands of expats fleeing, schools emptying, a ghost town being reclaimed by the desert.

The two experiences were yesterday evening's peak time which gave us traffic gridlock on Sheikh Zayed Road, on Al Sufouh Road, in Knowledge Village.

Then walking the length of Dubai Marina I was struck by the huge amount of construction still going on. There's the constant noise of generators, machinery, hammering, shouting along the full length of the Marina.

An awful lot of companies are still doing an awful lot of business.

They jumped the gun with the obituaries.

A different pace

Back in Oz, like many other places I'm sure, we complain endlessly about the time it takes our local councils to get things done.

The slowness is even more marked when you're used to the speed of things here, where whole cities get built in three or four years.

Our neighbour has just sent us some photos of work going on to upgrade our street.

The street is more like a country lane, with grassy banks either side, has less than fifty houses each side and is about a kilometre long.

Seven years ago the council started to upgrade it with kerbs and drainage and a footpath.

Seven years ago.

We're five houses from the top and they've just reached us. You can see what's been done at the lower section, between the two cars.




They're now doing the stretch in front of our house, across three houses, which they'll have finished in about a week.

A week.

We had a cemented-in rockery full of plants on the bank in front of our house. Yesterday it looked like this:

And although we had no say in whether it was done or what should be done, we have to pay half the cost. A$40 per metre for kerbing and A$37 per sq. metre for the footpath.

They never learn

I'm constantly amazed that in spite of being able to create and build huge projects, in an amazingly short period, organisations here can't ever seem to think about the most basic, simple requirements.

Not anything difficult, just the most basic admininstration and procedures.

I posted the other day about a major change to the flow of traffic just outside Knowledge Village, done in the dead of night so that the morning rush met a brand new road system - but no-one thought of the need to erect signs warning of "Changed Traffic Conditions".

The Metro was promoted by the brand-building 'My City - My Metro' ad campaign - but no-one thought to run a campaign telling people how to actually use the trains.

The Metro also has stations at the airport - but no-one thought that airline passengers would need to take their luggage on the train.

The National had another one in its report on the Abu Dhabi F1 race.

By all accounts they've created one of the world's best F1 racing circuits and infrastructure, and all in an amazing time-frame.

Then you get to the most basic parts, getting there and back.

They put in a whole fleet of shuttle buses - but no-one thought that they may need to tell passengers where to catch the buses or where the buses were going.

A passenger said:

"I found that while it got us there and to the event very well, there was no instruction getting back. People were getting on wrong buses, buses were going to wrong stops."

The electronic signs on the buses simply read 'Gateway', which not surprisingly confused a lot of passengers.

As usual, no-one thought of the basics in advance.

Having created chaos they hurriedly made the changes which should have been in place from the beginning:

Several changes were made yesterday to improve pedestrian traffic flow. A metal barrier separated the bus passengers heading towards the colour-coded parking zones from those heading to the three park-and-ride locations at Marina Mall, Shahama and Zayed Sport City.
The electronic signs on the buses now read Purple, Orange, Blue or Lime directing them to specific car parks.

"It’s a lot better tonight now that they have the bars filtering you into a line."

Mark Robinson, 30, from the UK, said it took him only five minutes to find a bus. The previous day getting on to a bus had taken an hour and 40 minutes, he estimated.

Organisations staffed by people from all over the world, many of them very highly paid, presumably recruited for their expertise. And time after time after time, across organisation after organisation, they get the basic simple stuff completely wrong.


The National story is here.