While I think this is a very valid point, why is that? I think in part it’s a sense that ordinary people can’t just up and take on stuff like this, with the story itself kinda validating that. The guy’s stairs are still getting ripped up anyway, and the project taken on through official channels. It’s not like people don’t volunteer their time to tackle causes and concerns they have, that’s one of our last remaining strong suits as USians- we just don’t look at our public infrastructure as something we can alter beyond the ballot box.
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I do contracting and estimates for work at a utility, particularly for commercial services. There’s a rough ballpark that can be calculated and given to the customer, the range can be pretty big and not totally representative of the actual cost and ends up as a “worst case scenario” price. I suspect the 65k was the ballpark, but used to stonewall requests to build the stairs. “Man it’s just so expensive and there’s other more important things we ought to be doing…”. I do this sometimes though it’s because the price will still be quite high and likely to scare away most with the exception of larger commercial groups.
The city deciding to go ahead and build it for 10k seems about right for me. I’m sure someone at the city got pressure put on them for higher up to make the problem go away.
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I was not being critical of the endeavor as such, but rather the article. The point of noting the stairs were crap was to counter the headline and tone of the article that the city just destroyed this perfectly good set of stairs that some kind citizen built because, government. Having a set of stairs that collapse on you is worse then not having stairs at all and those were going to get someone hurt. The city was right to tear them out. I mean, sure yay for getting things done, but they should be done right, yes?
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Well, the mayor stepped in, because social media hysteria was in full effect, traditional local media were falling all over each other to report on it (CTV sent up a helicopter), and the story had spread to CNN and the BBC.
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You know that lower part of the stairs with the boards and the rocks, I’ve been on many public park type places with steps like that.
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Probably because it’s much easier to complain and not actually do anything than it is to invest time and energy into resolving a problem.
I hear your point that not everyone has the same skill sets and access to resources, but I’m specifically talking about anyone whose comments here amount to nothing more than: “You call that a set of stairs? My dog can do better than that!”
Which totally misses the entire point of this story…
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There’s likely local groups or individuals that are skilled and qualified to build it to proper specs for free as a volunteer type thing, as long as the materials are provided. At least i know this kind of stuff is done all the time at parks here in the US, because their budgets are usually tight so they rely on people volunteering their time to help clean, build, and do whatever for public or state parks.
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Bless 'em all; every one.
None of which would have happened if the true gentleman in question had not decided to do what he thought was right. Sometimes “social media outrage” helps get shit done.
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It’s not just city bureaucracy that’s the problem. Case law surrounding government procurement creates huge liability for the public every time you go out to buy something. Basically the whole system is set up to make sure the government doesn’t get sued by the second place bidder for awarding it to the first place bidder. But everything costs, and we’ve gone so far in the direction of setting up audit trails that we basically don’t even give any weight to giving a good result.
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City GOV are experts at f’ing something up, I have experience in this realm…
There is the other possibility that even the new stairs were not the best use of $10,000 given that there were other ways to access the gardens. In order to placate the outrage machine it is likely that some other project was bumped.
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The stereotype is that America is super lawsuit fearing crazy town, but it was actually super common where I grew up for Eagle Scout projects to be stuff like building a bridge or some stairs or something along a hiking trail.
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Takes place in Canada. They take the law seriously, eh?
Oh, I missed this at the bottom:
“The city of Etobicoke is going to rebuild them with a price tag of $10,000, much to the delight of Mr. Astl, who has since been thanked by city officials for taking a stand.”
Still seems high, but way more reasonable than before.
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That’s a possibility, sure; but it’s not particularly germane to my actual point, which was that at least Mr. Astl did something proactive rather than just complaining.
Whether there were other access points is beside the point; clearly the people who traversed the steep path regularly weren’t using them, which makes not having a stairway at that particular juncture in a public space a potential liability.
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Given that local residents had already been injured repeatedly at the public park going that particular slope shows that paths into the park were not meeting expectations of use. If residents had been requesting stairs to be built, and getting injured then there’s a good reason for the city to look into it. The city is supposed to be serving them aren’t they?
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They are, but they are also supposed to be serving the other city residents. It may be that a larger number of people were doing something similar at another park, or that there were other needs that were more pressing. Without knowing what got bumped to allow for the stair project to proceed, we can’t know if just doing something was a positive change. Sometimes this type of thing is great because it breaks municipal apathy, but sometimes it is awful because it bumps a project that would have had greater benefits.
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Proactive is great, if it leads to an improved situation. If it leads to a better project being bumped, then we would have been better off with just complaining.
I’d say if another park or area was incurring more injuries, or a higher risk than this area that already had a history of residents getting hurt then sure prioritize that area. And then communicate that with local residents as to the why and give a timetable as to when they can revisit the discussion.
Dangling the cost of installation in front of residents and then throwing their hands up in the air means that the city was not concerned with the citizens best interests until they were embarrassed into action. They way you talk about it makes it seem like this park just stole life saving drugs from a baby, i’m sure the city burns more money doing nothing.
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That’s a lot of "if"s in your comment.
That’s my take on it as well.
Doing “nothing” about a problem rarely ever ‘fixes’ it.
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Or it means that any decent sized city gets dozens of requests a day for stuff like this and some low level person at the planning or parks department didn’t give a great answer to one impatient dude. I’m not saying that this is some grave horror, what I am saying is that I’m not going to praise someone for unilaterally changing the cities budgeted and planned parks process without some type of evidence that this is better than the alternative.
