01-12-2018, 09:50 PM
(01-12-2018, 09:13 PM)Canard Wrote:(01-12-2018, 03:34 PM)goggolor Wrote: Here's a conspiracy theory... it snows Sunday night/Monday AM. Monday morning at 10 AM GRT contacts the snow plow contractors and says "Please clear the snow from GRT bus stops. Per your contract you have 72 hours (!) to start this work and 48 hours to complete once you've started".
Contractor looks at the weather forecast and sees that on Thursday it's going to be 8 degrees above freezing. So they wait 71 hours until Thursday AM, go out and clear one bus stop, tell the region they've "started", and collect $115,000. Thursday afternoon all the bus stops are 'cleared' because of weather. And GRT users had to suffer through three days of uncleared stops.
It's unethical, but that's entirely plausible. If you were a private business trying to maximize profits, why wouldn't you do this?
The problem (as everyone has said over and over) is the verbiage of the contract.
Really we should just have the cities do it. They’re already doing tons of snow clearing so adding on a few bus stops isn’t much of a difference. Of course they should also be doing the sidewalks (at least I haven’t seen any serious attempt by anyone to argue to the contrary), which would make the bus stops even less of an additional job. Then you handle any issues through work scheduling and employee instructions, i.e., management, rather than trying to codify in some commercial contract exactly what is required.