Herts Highways recruited Elmer Fudd?



  • I called by the Herts Highways site to report a couple of nasty potholes in the road, and I find their list of possible faults amusing. Under 'R' for example you can report Rabbits, so I guess they'd have to send out Mr Fudd in a van?

    Other highway faults include "Noxious weeds" (under J there is a single entry "Japanese knotweed" if you want to get botanical with the highways agency) and bad XML. They hope you'll report the fault using a really horrible online map system that uses SVG map images. If you want to go all fancy and use SVG maps, at least generate some valid XML. In Firefox you just get an XML parse error. (SVG isn't necessarily what makes the map system bad, but it does make it extremely slow.)



  • There's more. What's the difference between "Animal carcass on the road" and "Dead animal (on the road)"? And if a Manhole, drain cover is not a Broken or sunken manhole/drain cover or a Drain Cover/Manhole Cover - broken or sunken, why is it a problem at all?

    Also I think plenty of people would like to report Traffic Cones as a fault and ask that they be removed.



  • Did you ever play Jaguar XJ220 on the Amiga? If you drove along a line of cones they'd all fly over the top of the car. I loved doing that.

    The rival Lotus III was the weirdest, you could bounce off other cars, bridge parapets and mountain sides at 220 kph without even a chip out of the paint.



  • @m0ffx said:

    There's more. What's the difference between "Animal carcass on the road" and "Dead animal (on the road)"? And if a Manhole, drain cover is not a Broken or sunken manhole/drain cover or a Drain Cover/Manhole Cover - broken or sunken, why is it a problem at all?

    Also I think plenty of people would like to report Traffic Cones as a fault and ask that they be removed.

    You're taking the "There must be one and only one definition of a problem" route, which is not going to work very well with some people. Imagine:

    Grandma wants to use this webbertube to report that there's a dead deer on the road to the supermarket. Hmm, what shall she choose? Dead deer.... dead deer... Well, there's no "Dead deer" but there is "Dead animal (on the road)", perhaps she should click that one.

    Later, Grandpa (other side of the family) needs to report that very same deer. He was driving home from the Elk Lodge and almost hit it! Lets see... Animal in road.... Ah! Animal carcass on the road! Excellent!

    Your proposed solution would be to have one particular entry, very likely "Obstruction; Animal" which neither Grandma nor Grandpa would ever think of; they would instead pick up their telephone and call the road department, wasting 10 minutes of the poor operator's time recounting their harrowing adventure!

    In any event, redundant types probably all get filed under the same header anyway, and this is just a nice way for people to be able to hit what they think of first, rather than racking their brain trying to think of how you would say "The manhole in the road is broken in two" instead of just reporting the problem.

    Also, the traffic cones bit is probably because work crews might have left traffic cones up somewhere, done their work, and forgotten to pick up the cones. It does happen.



  • I think my favourite is Christmas lights ... sounds like something out of Doctor Who, or the Chronicles of George. Phax!



  • Not to mention...

    Adopting a roundabout - This is a FAULT?
    Dog fouling - On the highway?
    Diesel Spill, Fuel spill, Petrol Spill - Top of page says "If the fault is an immediate threat to life and limb please call the police."
    Insurance claim - Is this a highway fault?
    Litter on pavement, Litter on road - I can see listing both "Abandoned car" and "Car, abandoned" but these are right next to each other!
    Manhole/drain cover in pavement - Isn't that where they're supposed to be?
    Rubbish dumped on road or pavement, Rubbish on pavement - same thing 

    Footpath weeds, Japanese knotweed, Knotweed, Noxious weeds, Pavement weeds, Poisonous weeds, Weeds, Weeds on pavement - This is getting a little bit excessive



  • Japanese knotweed very specifically is a BIG problem in many places. Grows like wildfire and gets everywhere. It's well known enough in many places that it'll be called that, and that is most likely IS that.

    Why so many different 'weed' categories? Because it's an A-Z listing. What next, going to complain that the Yellow Pages or Wikipedia has lots of categories that redirect to other places?

     

    The real WTF in this thread is people's ignorance. 



  • Wikipedia's tendency to have everything redirect everywhere else is a WTF. Are articles being renamed so frequently that links to them are perpetually out of date? Wikipedia is rather chaotic.

    As for "noxious" weeds, if you had a problem with weeds, surely you'd be looking under 'w' for "weeds" not 'n' for "noxious"? At this rate, we need an entry for every adjective in English that could be used to describe troublesome weeds.

    Apparently Hertfordshire was named top of a list of counties in the news this morning for potholes in roads. We do have some awful roads, although one of the worst has finally been taken care of recently. And in traditional style, it was then dug straight back up to work on cables or pipes or some such.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    Wikipedia's tendency to have everything redirect everywhere else is a WTF. Are articles being renamed so frequently that links to them are perpetually out of date? Wikipedia is rather chaotic.
     

    It's a WTF within articles, I agree. Typing Sea star in the Go box and being sent directly to the Starfish page is definitely not a WTF.

    @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    Apparently Hertfordshire was named top of a list of counties in the news this morning for potholes in roads. We do have some awful roads, although one of the worst has finally been taken care of recently. And in traditional style, it was then dug straight back up to work on cables or pipes or some such.

    Sounds like normal behaviour to me! ;)



  • oops, edit time expired and I forgot to address: 

    @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    As for "noxious" weeds, if you had a problem with weeds, surely you'd be looking under 'w' for "weeds" not 'n' for "noxious"? At this rate, we need an entry for every adjective in English that could be used to describe troublesome weeds.

    The user should be able to enter their own adjectives, that'll fix it! (I can't defend this one. I can only hope that somebody complained it wasn't there, and they added it because of that.)



  • @joemck said:

    Litter on pavement, Litter on road - I can see listing both "Abandoned car" and "Car, abandoned" but these are right next to each other!

    The litter could be on the pavement without being on the "road".



  • I've seen plenty of Traffic Cones closing off a lane with no actual construction anywhere in sight. I'd like to report those as a fault.

    "Manhole, drain cover" could cover a missing or stolen manhole cover, which obviously wouldn't fall under "Broken or sunken manhole/drain cover"



  • I took a trip to Canada a few years ago and there was some construction right across the border. I noticed all the cones were labeled "Michigan Department of Transportation," where do I go to report an international cone smuggling ring?



  • @Cap'n Steve said:

    I took a trip to Canada a few years ago and there was some construction right across the border. I noticed all the cones were labeled "Michigan Department of Transportation," where do I go to report an international cone smuggling ring?

    I wonder if they declared them at the border?



  • @Volmarias said:

    @m0ffx said:

    There's more. What's the difference between "Animal carcass on the road" and "Dead animal (on the road)"? And if a Manhole, drain cover is not a Broken or sunken manhole/drain cover or a Drain Cover/Manhole Cover - broken or sunken, why is it a problem at all?

    Also I think plenty of people would like to report Traffic Cones as a fault and ask that they be removed.

    You're taking the "There must be one and only one definition of a problem" route, which is not going to work very well with some people. Imagine:

     

    No, I'm thinking if they eliminated the redundancy, they would have a short enough list to put all on one page.So Grandpa looks down the list, finds nothing listed under 'animal', keeps reading, and finds 'dead animal in road'.


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