BRITAIN - WHERE ZEBRA CROSSINGS COST £114,000
15:00 - 25 October 2007
This week's shocker relates to Winterbourne Abbas.It is not a tale of rural promiscuity or civil war, it is about the zebra crossing. Or, rather, it is about the zebra crossing that I have not yet been able to persuade the Highways Agency to build there.
The children need a place to cross the A35 safely at the western end of the village. Successive headteachers have requested this, so has the parish council, hence my prolonged correspondence with the Highways Agency.
At one stage, it occurred to me that we might be able to get somewhere if we split up the costs between various bodies, so I asked what the costs were.
Now ask yourself: how much do you think it costs the Highways Agency to put up a zebra crossing?
There are the two poles each end - a hundred pounds each?
The electric bits on top and connecting them to the mains - another few hundred?
The need to drop kerbs, build the little island with its lights and, of course, marking the road.
Throw in traffic management during construction as well as road signs warning of the crossing, and one might think of £5,000, or even, at a stretch, £10,000? If you are tempted down this line of thought, you will have to adjust your sights somewhat.
It costs the Highways Agency £114,000 to put in the average zebra crossing, and that is before making any allowance for paying compensation to anyone whose front garden is affected.
If you find this impossible to believe, so did I, until I got it in writing from the agency itself.
How does the Highways Agency get to this incredible figure? Well, to start with, there is £11,000 for detailed design work. Given the striking similarity between one crossing and another, you would have thought you could have a standard design stored on the computer and just tweak it slightly. But this could not possibly cost more than a few pounds, so there must be a fresh design team, lovingly creating each crossing anew.
Next, we have "equipment" - the two poles, the electrics on top, the lights in the middle, a few road signs and wires, and the price is £16,000. It is probably worth remembering that this is enough to buy about 32 decent laptop computers or about 500 garden lights. Clearly, the poles for the zebras are made of titanium and the lights must come from NASA's space programme.
Then we come to what the Highways Agency calls "construction civils". This means the labour involved, and comes in at £87,000. A little thought-experiment is useful here. If the pay rate of the labourers is, say, £20 per hour, then the crossing must take 4,350 man-hours to make. That is more than 100 man-weeks, or 50 people working for two weeks, but I cannot work out what they would all be doing there for a fortnight unless, of course, 40 of them are supervising the other ten.
I am not sure the pyramids would have been constructed by now if the pharaohs had proceeded in this way.
All in all, I worry about a Britain where Highways Agency zebra crossings cost £114,000 each.
This week's shocker relates to Winterbourne Abbas.It is not a tale of rural promiscuity or civil war, it is about the zebra crossing. Or, rather, it is about the zebra crossing that I have not yet been able to persuade the Highways Agency to build there.
The children need a place to cross the A35 safely at the western end of the village. Successive headteachers have requested this, so has the parish council, hence my prolonged correspondence with the Highways Agency.
At one stage, it occurred to me that we might be able to get somewhere if we split up the costs between various bodies, so I asked what the costs were.
Now ask yourself: how much do you think it costs the Highways Agency to put up a zebra crossing?
There are the two poles each end - a hundred pounds each?
The electric bits on top and connecting them to the mains - another few hundred?
The need to drop kerbs, build the little island with its lights and, of course, marking the road.
Throw in traffic management during construction as well as road signs warning of the crossing, and one might think of £5,000, or even, at a stretch, £10,000? If you are tempted down this line of thought, you will have to adjust your sights somewhat.
It costs the Highways Agency £114,000 to put in the average zebra crossing, and that is before making any allowance for paying compensation to anyone whose front garden is affected.
If you find this impossible to believe, so did I, until I got it in writing from the agency itself.
How does the Highways Agency get to this incredible figure? Well, to start with, there is £11,000 for detailed design work. Given the striking similarity between one crossing and another, you would have thought you could have a standard design stored on the computer and just tweak it slightly. But this could not possibly cost more than a few pounds, so there must be a fresh design team, lovingly creating each crossing anew.
Next, we have "equipment" - the two poles, the electrics on top, the lights in the middle, a few road signs and wires, and the price is £16,000. It is probably worth remembering that this is enough to buy about 32 decent laptop computers or about 500 garden lights. Clearly, the poles for the zebras are made of titanium and the lights must come from NASA's space programme.
Then we come to what the Highways Agency calls "construction civils". This means the labour involved, and comes in at £87,000. A little thought-experiment is useful here. If the pay rate of the labourers is, say, £20 per hour, then the crossing must take 4,350 man-hours to make. That is more than 100 man-weeks, or 50 people working for two weeks, but I cannot work out what they would all be doing there for a fortnight unless, of course, 40 of them are supervising the other ten.
I am not sure the pyramids would have been constructed by now if the pharaohs had proceeded in this way.
All in all, I worry about a Britain where Highways Agency zebra crossings cost £114,000 each.
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