My road is a case in point — on which Southwark Council just finished an expensive length of new paving stones, flash limestone curbs, and slick, separated bike lanes.  Recall, who did I say was advancing down my street with all the inexorability of death and taxes? Thames Water. Any day now the entire renovation will be reduced to a mound of rubble. Why couldn't Thames Water have replaced its famously "Victorian" water mains before the council spent a fortune spiffing up the street? 

Lastly, TfL needs to force companies to leave public property the way they found it.  Routinely, attractive, neatly laid grey paving stones are hacked to pieces for another shortcut to China, and then replaced with an ugly, uneven splodge of lumpy tarmacadam. It's like repairing a footpath with Blu Tack, and amounts to legalised vandalism.

Particularly post-2000, this erstwhile beautiful city has looked like Mogadishu. Yeah, yeah, London is one of the world's great metropolises — but only if you can see beneath the blaring orange traffic cones, garish green plastic barriers, threatening red signage, piles of bright blue pipe, and hulking yellow earth movers, their muddy teeth snarling like pitbulls on steroids.  Eventually we should improve on this medieval technology that accesses vital infrastructure by destroying vital infrastructure, since having to hack up the roads to get at sewer pipes is moronic. But before that happy day, let's at least make indolent, often high-handed companies pay for tearing up public property and for bringing this fine city to a standstill — not just during rush hours on key arteries, but all day, anywhere.