Impassable

I have commented before on the frequency (and protractedness) of sidewalk renovations in this city - but just lately, things have been getting ridiculous.

The sidewalks on both sides of Jiugulou Dajie, the main southbound street near my apartment (which I walk along nearly every day), have been completely impassable for a couple of months: although much wider than in most parts of town, these would-be pedestrian thoroughfares are riddled with holes and trenches, piles of sand and stacks of paving slabs every few yards. It's particularly difficult to traverse these obstacles at night, since street lights are few and far between, of rather low brightness (the government no doubt claim this as a sign of their Green consciousness, but it's probably more to do with the shortfall in generating capacity), and largely obscured by the ubiquitous bloody trees anyway. Lately, I have fallen into the habit of cutting through the hutong back-alleys when I go out at night - because it really is just too darned hazardous to try to negotiate these sidewalks in this half-dug up condition (and there are no warning signs or tape cordons, of course!).

And it was not just this street. Almost all the major streets in the centre of the city seem to have been reduced to this condition. The shots above were in fact taken a couple of weeks ago on Zhang Zizhonglu - one of the city's main east-west thoroughfares!

We always get big seasonal splurges of this kind of repair work, but this year it seems to have been more thoroughgoing, more widespread than ever before. And it started in September, within days of the Paralympics concluding. I wonder if perhaps the deterioration of the sidewalks (another trees problem - the shallow root systems often chew up the paving within the space of 6 months or so, requiring continual re-levelling) has been more chronic this year because the spring/early summer repairs were done earlier than usual (and perhaps in a more rushed, slipshod manner - if such a thing is possible!) because of the panic about prettying the city up in time for the Olympics. It seems quite likely.

The most alarming thing about this phenomenon is not the inconvenience and health & safety risk it constitutes, nor its startling ubiquity - but the fact that it has gone on such a long time. The work was begun in late September or early October, but proceeded very slowly - and then seemed to be abandoned altogether for several weeks. I began to worry that it might be another indication of the impact of the 'global meltdown': if the Chinese government is running out of money to complete routine public works...... then we are all in big trouble.

PS Just in the last couple of weeks, the sidewalk re-laying finally seems to have been completed. The workforce was diverted elsewhere for a month or two, I suppose. Perhaps the 'global meltdown' effect here is that China is channelling its spend-it's-way-out-of-recession efforts into more conspicuous public projects like new roads and bridges and subways, and mundane pothole-filling is occasionally getting sidelined.