Dayton Construction

Here's the link to the last Dayton Construction post.

Yesterday the politicians and bureaucrats got together and patted themselves on the back for successfully spending so much of other people's money on the Great Miami Boulevard project. Here's a picture of the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

This is the public celebration where they pretend that they did this project for the people of Dayton. I bet they also had a private party funded with other people's money where they be honest.

Now seems like a pretty good time for an informal postmortem on the project. Politicians and bureaucrats don't think like people in the private sector. If this project been done in the private sector, the project manager and probably others would have been fired for managing such a poor project. A private company would have scheduled this project to take three months or less, but the government took 17 months. A private sector company would have scheduled the playscape to be moved in a week or less, but the government took 16 months. The vast majority of days this project was being undertaken, nobody showed up to work on it. And I'm just counting winter months. I'm talking about during the "construction season", whatever that is. And last winter was the mildest winter we've had in many years. During the winter I was concerned that bugs would be bad in the summer because we had only a couple of freezes of short duration, none of them hard freezes. But the government still didn't do any construction because it wasn't during the "construction season". By the way, they have yet to put a flag on the flag pole.

But the schedule and the squandering of materials and equipment during that schedule weren't the only problems with this project. While it was going on I noted they had created a water backup problem that they would have to fix. As this picture shows, they didn't fix it.

This is after minor sprinkles. It's going to be a serious problem during actual storms. It's going to rapidly degrade the intersection at Great Miami and Grand.

I also pointed out that they put a park on a valuable piece of property. This picture shows the extension of Grand Ave. down from the I-75 ramp where it intersects with Great Miami Boulevard.

This would be a perfect place for one of those gas station/quick mart/ fast food combination stores, but they city won't let that happen because it put some shrubs and flowers there.


They also managed to severely screw over a local business.

There used to be a cut through the median so cars going both directions could go down that spur and get to the local grocery, but the city cut that business off from traffic flowing from Riverview to Main. Grand Ave. is just to the left of this picture, so they also cut the business off from all traffic on Grand. It's terrible. It would have been such a little thing to allow cars to turn left into that business. The designers were probably afraid traffic would back up into the intersection with Grand. I doubt this business will survive being cut off like this. The designers probably killed it either through negligence or on purpose and don't care. Had the project manager done it right, he would have provided access to this business and allowed a business on that corner, and the two businesses would have boosted each other and provided a nice economic boost to the neighborhood. People could have purchased gas and some fried chicken then picked up some milk and bananas on the way home. But no. This project insures the neighborhood will be more depressed than ever, and it made every person in Dayton except the politicians, bureaucrats and their cronies poorer.

And the new stop light at Great Miami and Riverview is a pain. Very little traffic flows along Great Miami up Riverview to or from Salem. Most of the traffic goes from Forest down Riverview to and from Main, but the light is green significantly longer, I'd guess at least twice as long if not three time as long, for the lighter traveled direction.


The people who designed and managed this project should be fired, not celebrating.