A few weeks ago seven boys and girls from Auckland Transport (AT) came across to sort out the ignorant savages who live on Waiheke. We are, of course, ignorant savages in comparison with the Magnificently Superior Creatures from the mainland, who exist on an infinitely higher plain--somewhere above Alpha Centauri, at a rough guess.
The Magnificent Seven, stood about, armed with magnificent clipboards, and magnificently identified pressing problems that did not exist, then went away to the Magnificent Mainland to plan them out of existence. But... when you set out to eliminate problems that did not exist you bring into existence problems that were not there before and never should be.
But, being from the Alpha Centauri Mainland, they did not know that, so they did not see the real problems in the two bus-stops on either side of O'Brien Road at its intersection with Te Whau Drive. There had been two small problems. Two bus-stops, one small problem each.
First, there was a small problem at the stop opposite Te Whau Drive, because it was only the shoulder of the road. That was OK except in wet weather and days after it, because buses always pulled over to the shoulder so as to get off O'Brien Road as far as possible, and therefore kept digging a pothole when they accelerated away, which filled with muddy water, so passengers who had just alighted were likely to be deluged brown.
All that was needed to fix that was to seal or concrete the shoulder, then that pothole would never appear.
But the Magnificent Seven did not see that. No perception, no local knowledge, no concern for anything except to spend the Maximum of Ignorant Savages' money and thus feel Maximum Magnificent Important.
Therefore at huge expense a Magnificent Design was done, and a large gang of workmen and machines from Fulton Hogan were hired to spend several days turning that Magnificent Design into concrete, wood and pipe. They built a raised concrete pad, edged with a high concrete curbing, which certainly eliminated the pothole (very good) but also eliminated the shoulder that buses had been able to pull over to (bad, bad, bad). So now buses were obliged to block the road when they stopped. Magnificent!
And block it further up the road, making it impossible for vehicles to use the mouth of Te Whau Drive to pass the bus.
Second there was a small problem at the stop on the other side of the road, on the corner of Te Whau Drive and O'Brien. It had long had a nice little bus shelter, one of those cute rustic ones that fit the character of our village-rural environment. But because its concrete floor was significantly lower than the shoulder of the road, rain sent buckets of muddy water down into the shelter, so people then had to immerse their shoes in a muddy swamp. The obvious solution was to unbolt the shelter from its concrete base and pour a new base on top, thus raising it about 250mm. Then the floor of the shelter would be a bit above the shoulder of the road.
But the Magnificent Seven did not see that. No perception, no local knowledge, no concern for anything but how to spend the maximum of Maximum of Ignorant Savages' money and thus feel Maximum Magnificent Important.
Therefore at huge expense, a Magnificent Design was done, and a large gang of workmen and machines from Fulton Hogan were hired to spend several days turning that Magnificent Design into concrete, metal, gravel and wood. They built a raised curve of concrete curbing going right round the corner, and between it and the bus-shelter they laid down a wide swathe of deep gravel.
So now the floor of the shelter is even further below the edge of the road, which means that to get out of it and into a bus you have to climb a gravel slope and summit on a high curb; and low-slung buses have a problem pulling into that stop; and mothers with push-chairs are presented with an upward-sloping gravel obstacle-course that makes it hard to get a child and a push-chair into a bus quicker than jaunt to Alpha Centauri; and buses can no longer pull into the mouth of Te Whau Drive
to clear O'Brien Road, so are obliged to block O'Brien Road on that side too. Magnificent!
On top of all that, motorists coming out of Te Whau Drive into O'Brien Road now tend to swing wide to clear that curbing round the corner--so wide that as you stand waiting for a bus you see most of them crossing the centre-line into traffic coming up O'Brien Road. Magnificent!
O'Brien Road at that point was already narrow; it has now been narrowed even more.
All that is because the Magnificent Seven failed to see the real problems, and so they created problems that had not been there before. Well done, O Magnificent Seven! That's Progress!? Take a boo.
As a wise old bus-driver observed: 'They made a bad situation worse.'
If AT ceased to exist Waiheke would be better off. They don't know where it's at. But they do know how to wAsTe buckets of our money.
AT is worse than incompetent. Incompetence does badly a job that needed doing. Worse-than-incompetent does a job that did not need doing, never needed doing, and should never have been done or even contemplated--and does it badly. Very badly. That is AT.
In the matter of those two bus stops, AT, not content with being worse than incompetent, carried on and reached even greater depths of profligate stupidity. The bus stops had always been next to earth and bush, but after it had made such a damnable mess of them it decided that there was not enough earth on that part of the planet, so it hired people to buy some more out of ratepayers money and sprinkle it about.
But they were still not finished with being mind-bogglingly stupid and damnably wasteful. They erected a sign, spang in the middle of the grass footpath that leads to one of the bus stops, so now pedestrians have to dodge out on to the road at that point. All AT needed to do, and was told to do, was to keep the grass mown so that the verge was always a usable path. They failed to do that. Instead, they blocked it. With a useless eyesore of a sign on the edge of a beautiful forest reserve. and to underscore their stupidity the sign is a warning to motorists to watch out for pedestrians--the very pedestrians who are forced on to the road because of the sign.... !!!!!!!!!!!!!
Adding insult to injury, everything they have done at and around the two stops is ugly; it is out of keeping with the environment. They are not only worse than incompetent; they are also environmentally insensitive. And thieves, because they take public money to create their vandalism.
In the study of logic a term is used that is also used in mathematics: IFF. IFF is an abbreviation for 'If, if, and only if.' The fundamental dictum in logic is 'IFF the premise is true and the reasoning is true the conclusion must be true.' Or, as it can also be stated, in reverse, 'IFF the premise is false or the reasoning is false the conclusion will always be false, it cannot possibly be true.' All that can be put more simply: 'Unless you start with the truth and proceed by the way of truth you cannot possibly arrive at anything true.' AT has repeatedly proved by what it arrived at that it did not start with the truth or proceed by the way of truth. It ignored the fundamentals of good service. And it did it all on ratepayers' money. It is therefore chronically guilty of fundamentally bad service and public thievery.
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AT's sunken bus-stop shelter at the intersection of Te Whau Drive and O'Brien Rd and the gravel ascent now needed to escape it--a well-nigh impassable barrier for push-chairs:
The thick pad that was installed by profligate AT instead of just fixing the puddle--where the puddle had been is marked. The pad has already been broken, obviously by a bus that got too close when the driver tried to pull over:
As Google Earth saw that intersection, both ways, before AT's blind machinations got at it:
Public servants are the salt of the earth. They care about people, they are thoughtful and prudent and behave as good stewards of public time and money. But bureaucrats are none of those things; they are the opposite. Scientific analysis of them, including a study back in the 1990s, shows plainly that they have the same psychological profile as individuals who commit crimes against the person--those who are guilty of the assault, rape, domestic violence, child-abuse and murder. They are thugs, but not with fists and physical weapons. Their assaults on people and the populace deploy their two favourite words: policy and process--either good policy invented by public servants, which the bureaucrats turn to evil, or evil policy that they themselves invented. They seek out positions of power in order to exercise their wicked thuggery. They vindicate themselves by covering their evil with cloaks of fine words, pretty logos and flash offices, etc., but the evil is always there.
In a word, they are insane. Not Section 8, barking-made insane, but psychologically dysfunctional with deep-seated sociopathic tendencies. The proofs of their sociopathy are plain, in the 'thinking' they manifest in their designs and bureaucratic rules, in the careless way they waste public money, and in the fact that they do not strive to do things in the ways that are the least-disruptive, carry the minimum of upset, have the lowest cost, and have the maximum careful attention to the people who will be on receiving end of their actions. A part of their madness is the self-delusion that they are not dysfunctional, a delusion inflated by their vanity.
Bureaucrats are thugs, they are evil, they are mad. AT has a plethora of them.
