(No, I’m not writing poetry here.)
You’d think that a country with so many heavy drinkers would have good sidewalks, wouldn’t you? I mean, you can’t have the drunks falling down through no fault of their own, right? Well, maybe you can, but it’s not entirely the fault of the drunks.
It’s the construction industry that’s to blame.
See, there’s so much ongoing construction and demolition here that if they had “normal” sidewalks (poured concrete), they’d be jackhammering them up and putting them back down every other week. And that’d just be noisy and messy and more hassle than anybody wants to deal with. So what do they do instead?They use bricks and sand.
Yup, no mortar or anything to hold the bricks in place, just gravity, pressure and sand. It works about as well as it sounds. Now, they don’t use plain, rectangular bricks. That’d be stupid. They’ve got these funky ones that sort of interlock in a “you could probably move this brick without too much trouble, but at least it’s more stable than a plain brick” kind of way.Great in theory (maybe), but not so great in practice.
Observe:
You see? Somebody goes and takes one brick out and before you know it, everybody’s gotta have one and the sidewalk looks like crap. Not much fun to walk or skate on either.
My best guess here is that they pulled up the sidewalk when running lines to or from those utility boxes, then everybody thought somebody else was going to put it back. And it’s not like it’s all that hard. The standard method is to smooth out the dirt where the bricks are going to go, set the bricks in place, then scatter a bunch of sand over the tops of them. The sand gets forced into the cracks by foot traffic and rain, which more or less holds the whole deal together.
Most of the time, anyways. Sometimes you get stuff like this:
Well, all the bricks are there – for the most part – it’s just that the ground felt like moving. I’m not sure what did this. My guess is on soft ground and/or the rain.
And in case anybody’s wondering, no, stuff like this doesn’t get fixed. These two spots have been in exactly this condition for as long as I’ve lived in this neighborhood. (Over 7 months now.) But you learn where the bad spots are and avoid them. Especially when it snows. The holes fill up really well and are serious ankle-traps.
It’s sloppy for sure, and it irked me for a while. But I’ve gotten used to it. I can understand why they go this route, since they’re pulling them up every so often. However, when it’s that simple of a process, you’d think they’d take the extra 10-15 minutes and put the damned bricks back when they’re done.
Or not. I suppose they’re in a hurry to head out and start drinking.
^.^