COMMERCIAL STREET - COMMON SENSE DISASTER

 

When Smart People Build Stupid Streets

Commercial Street just got a multi-million-dollar “world-class” makeover — and it’s already a maintenance headache before the ribbon’s even cut.

How? Well, apparently, when you gather enough designers, architects, consultants, and engineers in one place, you can make decisions that would get you laughed out of a high school shop class.

The White Carpet Syndrome

Somewhere in the design phase, someone thought: “You know what downtown traffic needs? A pale, porous concrete surface that shows every tire mark, oil drip, and gull dropping in glorious high definition.” That’s like laying a white carpet in a bus station and acting surprised when it gets dirty.

Fixing Problems You Just Made

Before: Pavers with natural grip, asphalt that hid grime. 

After: Smooth concrete that needed immediate sandblasting — not to clean, but to stop people from slipping.

You can’t make this up: we paid for a brand-new street and had to scuff it up before opening day.

The Alphabet Soup Illusion

These aren’t the blunders of amateurs. Oh no. These are the decisions of people with so many letters after their names, their business cards look like Wi-Fi passwords.

Somewhere between the CAD renderings, “visioning” sessions, and catered stakeholder lunches, basic common sense went missing.

Simple truths they forgot:

• Don’t make things harder to clean.

• Don’t turn a safe surface into a slip hazard.

• Don’t design something that looks worse a week after opening than it did on the grand unveiling.

The Real Head-Shaker

What’s truly baffling is not that mistakes were made — it’s that these mistakes were predictable, inevitable, and baked in from the start.

You didn’t need a PhD to see this coming. You just needed a broom, a mop, and maybe a memory of how streets actually get used.

In an age of highly educated stupidity, Commercial Street may just be the new poster child — a monument to what happens when qualifications replace judgment, and credentials outweigh common sense.