Replacing wayward traffic cones costs firms thousands
Cone poaching, cone drowning and cone defacing is going unchecked in Christchurch.
One-fifth of the 100,000 road cones that adorn Garden City streets are casualties, costing traffic companies more than $70,000 a year.
The silent sentinels have been seen decorating tree branches, floating down rivers, sitting atop cars, flattened on footpaths and lounging around student flats.
More than $3 million worth of road cones are scattered across the city and the orange army has taken on a life of its own.
They were wrapped in tinsel at Christmas, sported bunny faces at Easter and sprouted flowers to mark the first anniversary of the February 22 earthquake earlier this year.
One Christchurch cone was even found ‘‘bizarrely bejewelled’’ by a traffic management company recently.
Despite the apparent fondness for the cone, officials have a stern word for the city: ‘‘I can see why people want to make them look pretty, and why they may find it funny to move them – but please don’t touch our cones,’’ as one traffic official said.
The average lifespan of a road cone was little more than a year because of rigid standards, but the fivekilogram safety hazards were a ‘‘necessary evil’’ to protect workers and the public, traffic companies said.
Retrieving the cones from tree limbs, backyards, school fields, atop phone booths and in rivers was ‘‘frustrating’’ and degrading for workers.
Downer traffic services manager Jon Atherton was responsible for about 12,000 road cones and said the task was ‘‘challenging’’. People deliberately opening their car doors to knock down hundreds of lines of perfectly placed cones happened ‘‘relatively regularly’’.
Seven days a week, a Downer crew was out on the streets before sunrise replacing hundreds of wayward cones, he said.
On an average working site, Atherton expected about 20 per cent of the cones would go astray.
An individual cone costs $31 and the casualty rate was costing some companies up to $70,000 each year, he estimated. ‘‘People do target your equipment. Mostly it comes down to an element of tomfoolery with drunken students.’’
City Care spokesman Mike Smith said in the past financial year, about 2500 cones had been lost.
Despite most companies blaming the misplacement of cones on drunken revellers, a number spoke of a ‘‘recent shift change’’ where small contractors were poaching unguarded road cones at night.