Construction disruption frustrates

It’s an all too familiar story.

Small businesses that are already facing all the trials and travails they must regularly face — the hard slog of attracting customers in an internet-shopping world; the high costs for bricks-and-mortar locations, such as rent and insurance; a weak economy; and the difficulties of attracting and keeping staff — suddenly have to deal with a new problem.

The City of Winnipeg and its deathly slow road-construction schedule.

For most of us, it’s a time-wasting irritant. But for businesses facing lengthy street-construction projects, it’s a business strangler.

Claire Venevongsa is the owner of Pad Thai on Portage Avenue. She told the Free Press last week that lengthy, consecutive construction projects have limited access to her St. James restaurant since July. Sales have fallen, while bills keep coming. The restaurant has been in business for 25 years.

“I’m frustrated,” she said. “It must be a reason why they need to repair, but (there’s) only 12 months in a year and then I’m now (close to) hitting the (fifth) month (of construction).”

Sidewalk work near the restaurant began in July and finished at the end of August.

September brought water main repairs — after a series of breaks — and they aren’t set to end until early November.

Yes, in a city with an extensive infrastructure deficit, there’s work that has to be done to keep up, and there’s emergency work that must be done as well.

But the weight of that work should not fall disproportionately on individual businesses, especially as work drags on and on and on — as it often does.

For commuters and businesses alike, there seems to be a distinct lack of understanding by the city of the concept of cause and effect: as repair season starts, projects break ground and delays mount — sometimes, with multiple projects on several streets in the same area, so that long commutes becoming even longer, and businesses have potential customers facing confounding detours-stacked-on-detours.

Then there’s the prospect of just how long the delays will actually last. Some projects indicate at least a prospective end date, which is sometimes actually met.

Other projects seem as though contractors only have to commit to when the work will begin and start breaking up pavement.

After that, it seems as if they actually do the work in a way that suits their own particular schedule.

Put up your hand if you’ve seen a piece of heavy equipment or a pile of rubble abandoned between construction barricades for weeks or months on end — OK, everybody, you can all put down your hands now.

Through all of that, there seems to be no consideration given to the cumulative effect of simultaneous projects.

A restaurant such as Pad Thai might be able to weather a lengthy sidewalk installation but, when the new sidewalks are in and water-main repairs start almost immediately, the window for recovery from the last round of hardship disappears.

Frankly, it must be hard for a business owner not to look at that kind of planning and imagine the city is either punitive or completely uncaring.

The way the city looks at necessary civic repairs has to change.

There must be a holistic review, not only of what projects will cost the city in dollars and cents, but what the project will cost taxpayers in other ways as well — in the form of lost business, lost time and increased expenses.

You can’t just plan for what necessary public work has to be done in a particular year — you also should plan for how that work will affect the residents and businesses that have to work here.

It’s not an unreasonable thing to ask.