Incentives to rush usually equals incentives for shit work: Georgia Department of Transportation offers up to a $3.1 million dollar bonus to the company responsible for repairing I-85, if they can finish everything up before Memorial Day
Look, I’m all about getting I-85 up and running as quickly as possible. And my bad on the part of previously saying that it wasn’t going to be done until Thanksgiving, because clearly I tuned out for a little bit and missed where they thought they would get it done by June 15th instead. Whatever though, it’s not the weekend like the sinkhole was fixed in Japan, so it’s still taking way too fucking long to fix something that should really be fixed even faster than a target date of Memorial Day weekend.
And it’s obvious why Georgia wants I-85 fixed before May 25th, because that’s Memorial Day weekend, one of the heaviest loads of expected traffic all across the nation. Surely, the loss of I-85 is going to be extremely taxing to I-285 on both sides as people would be forced to use those roads instead of the straight shot through the city itself, which then has a trickle effect on I-20, as well as I-75. Ironically, those actually in the city of Atlanta itself would probably benefit the most, from prepared drivers not utilizing city proper streets.
Back to the point however, the fact that GDOT is literally putting a price tag on getting the construction done sooner can only lead to bad things. Namely shortcuts, shoddy work, and compromised safety guidelines as construction workers will do whatever they can here and there to shave nickels and dimes of time off of their daily schedules, with hopes that the laundry list of things that need to be done get ticked away faster, leading to improved chances at scoring that fat $3.1 million dollar bounty.
I would rather I-85 take until Thanksgiving to be repaired correctly, stress and safety checked a hundred thousand times to ensure that the burnination and collapse of it once, can never possibly happen again, than getting it back by Memorial Day, because the state DOT basically put a bounty on the task, and Georgians and other motorists are basically going to get a pillowcase with a face drawn on it and called it a repaired I-85.
Undoubtedly with a timed bonus put in place, the company in charge of repairing I-85 is going to be doing whatever it takes to pocket as much of the bonus as they can, including taking every single shortcut, cutting every little corner, fudging every single safety check, and in a completely predictably ironic fashion, watch there be barrels of god-knows-what incendiary materials be left under the bridge. Just so a bunch of construction workers can cash in on a bonus they should never have been offered in the first place that put safety as a secondary priority.
