The Curse of Incompetence in the Public Works.

I've lived in a particular area for over 10 years now and on a quasi-daily basis I drive by a specific stretch of road. Along the years several accidents were recorded here, mostly because of bad driving combined with horrific road design, road signals(signs), and poor safety precautions.

Normally, when you place a barrier to prevent automobiles from driving themselves off dangerous stretches of a road like say, a cliff, you place in such a manner as to make it relatively safe to hit it with said automobile and to thereby minimize the damage done to both the car, its passengers and the barrier.

For instance, if you were to hit the first post of a road barrier, you'd likely cause yourself more damage that if you hit the barrier in a sideswiping manner right in the middle of the stretch.

However the laddies at the transport ministry, being the mildly retarded chaps that they are, insist on killing bad drivers by placing the beginning of these road barriers exactly in the spot you might hit, if you lost control of your car in a curve and drove off road.

This results in the following:



Notice the scrunched up remains of the road barrier, also notice the weird sidewalk design where the sidewalk actually DROPS like on a driveway entry, allowing the automobile to further drive itself off the road in a more efficient and quicker way. Also, this is not the first time that particular barrier winds up that way, it usually will get repaired within a month or two (although this time it's been like that for over two months), but they replace it exactly where it was before; so that the first wooden post is the immediate target of any out of control car.

The other thing I notice is the launch-ramp there is right outside of the road, you can't see it on the photo but if you were to go stand on those launch-ramps...er, hills you could see the highway directly below them. You could jump off those and land on the highway, for added fun, they also have a service road blocked off on the left outside edge so you might think of landing on the service road, to then only wind up hitting a large yellow checker-patterned metallic sign.

I wonder, has anyone ever though of starting the damned barrier 50ft ahead? I'm almost 100% certain that SIDESWIPING the barrier would cause less damage to the car and its occupants that hitting that first post head on no?

Seriously, who do we have to fuck in order to get a decent/safe road system?