So the city for the last few years has been fixing up old pipes. Around last semester they finally got around to my area at the edge of Philadelphia county only a few city blocks away from Cheltenham (yippee!). The problem is I live on a block that has street cleaning on one side and paid parking on the other side, so since they are working on the paid parking side I have to park on the side street but ”oh wait, I cant do that” cause the street cleaning is Monday along with the trash collection. And to make matters worse they also close down that side street anyways. So you would think okay, just park on the neighboring block, well that would be a viable option if only they weren’t doing both blocks! I also don’t have the option of using the garage because that’s basically my dad’s workshop and even if he had no car back there, he’d put one of his other cars there because outside of the main three that my household uses my dad at any given time may have five other cars. So when this all happened they luckily split it up more than they had initially let on so we could find parking close by, and the street cleaners didn’t actually show up until late spring or early summer and it was February. Unfortunately though there was still a problem. They f4*#@d up the road and sidewalk so now parking on the block was a puzzle everyday of figuring out if you were parked correctly.
They would eventually leave our block earlier than anticipated. (finally I would no longer have to ask my dad to move a cone to help direct my car off the closed off side of the block they weren’t working on so I could just go to class in peace or catch a taxi when all other options were cut off.) The downside was they moved on to other areas near me so I had a 10 minute detour several days and was caught unaware and was late on occasion because of this. But after a few months as spring had finally begun to rear its head it would finally be over. There would be some days where more road work was happening but nothing major that would cause detours. That is until this past month.
So last week I noticed that they were doing some road work again in the area. They added speed bumps in front of the Elementary school which was a good addition to the area as people like to speed near me (I’ve heard crashes at nighttime). This was all fine although they did leave the trail of bumpy holes that plague six blocks of road that people literally drive in the bike lanes to avoid due to their size and prevalence (you will exit one and be in another in a snap). And then the block behind me had some work and then I got home last Friday and saw the signs I never wanted to see again. The road work signs for the week of Halloween. Now if you listen closely as you’re reading this you can probably hear my frustration, although you are reading this so you are reading it rather than hearing it I suppose. As the fall hasn’t officially begun street cleanings are still happening and my block and about three others have these signs all for the same days. So we moved all the cars (Some to not so convenient spots but they were moved.) All except mine though as apparently my dad who was moving them didn’t see anywhere we could squish my tiny hatchback car. My mom and I proceeded to circle that area for about half an hour to find a place to put my car so that it wouldn’t be towed to the train station where other cars that did not move have been towed to previously. Hopefully when I get home the rest of the week from when I write this (it’s the 27th btw) I won’t struggle too much with the city trying to fix the rushed “patch job” they did last winter. I really don’t want to put up with the city’s shenanigans at the moment. Why they won’t just do the job well on the first go-around by hiring city workers instead of the random company they did will baffle me endlessly.
Update Nov 2nd:
So they really didn’t do anything, at all. They did all of this and for what? To cut a few little lines in the ground to mark the crappy patch jobs that they did. They are probably gonna shadow drop new notices this month and then do nothing, plan to work the week of Thanksgiving and then do absolutely nothing cause that’s a holiday. I’ve been able to at the very least find nearby parking so there’s something positive but I don’t know for how long the positivity will last as eventually once the city figures itself out the road work will have to happen and I just hope I can escape to campus when it does happen so I can avoid calling a taxi to get to where I need to go.
Featured Image By Aleishka Ruiz via Canva
