Currently, there are 1294 cones on the DCC’s George Street revamp project. They revealed that they’ve lost around $10k worth of cones and road signs to theft and damage on the project every quarter. That’s $40k a year. They said that, while they couldn’t break that figure down any further, “it does give you an idea of the impacts.”
There are no limits to what you can do with a road cone and a good imagination. However, DCC project manager Glen said that cone antics have been a “constant challenge” for the retail quarter crew. “And I’m not saying that this is students!” said Glen. “I’m just saying that this often happens on weekends.” Meanwhile, fifth-year student Josh was pretty up-front about the reality of the situation: “We rearrange [them] so that people can’t get to the street,” he laughed. Classic.
The construction goes right through the centre of town, directly in the path of town-goers returning from a night on the piss. On your way home, your fingers will have itched at the seductive plethora of cones on the streets, ripe for the taking. If the DCC didn’t want them to be stolen, why would they leave them so openly strewn about? And why would they be so perfectly funnel-shaped? For a herd-based species like cones, this cone-stitutes an extraordinarily high-risk environment.
Glen said that while they know it can be tempting for people to “liberate [cones] from their locations or put [them] other places”, cone antics “[do] put people at risk.” Since a major part of the construction on George is updating water infrastructure, there are some big pits that need to be coned off to keep residents safe. Heaps of cones mean that these holes are well-marked, and there’s safety in numbers. But with numbers comes cost; the DCC rents the cones out for 50 cents a day, per cone. With 1294 cones, that’s $647 per day. And no, stealing cones does not mean that you’re helping them save money. Your actions have cone-sequences.
Glen told Critic Te Ārohi that in some instances it can mean a setback in terms of timeline, which is a bit of an incone-venience. On Great King Street, they recently had a site get messed with so badly that workers weren’t able to do the work they’d been contracted to as markings had been moved. “So, you know, just from five or ten minutes of someone mucking around with the site, that lost us a day,” said Glen. And as the construction is currently the butt of frustration for most city-dwellers, Glen said that they want to get out of there just as quickly as the rest of us.
Glen could respect the hustle, though. On one occasion, his workers witnessed some people in a car in front of them literally wind down their window and try to snatch a cone from the side of the road. It was apparently “a bit heavier than they expected,” Glen laughed. “Their operation didn’t go as smoothly as they wanted, so they drove off, I think probably quite embarrassed.” Other times they’ve just been left impressed by the out-of-pocket locations cones have been found, like seeing a cone on top of a tree that was “really quite tall”, causing the workers to wonder exactly how they had got them up the top of there. The person who put it there probably doesn’t know, either.
Josh proudly shared that his personal favourite cone antic in the past had been to put them face-down in the public toilets “so they have to take it out when they go to the toilet,” said Josh. “I thought it was funny at the time, little deviant I am.”
The ‘Totally Georgeous’ team are planning a social media campaign in the coming weeks to plead with klepto breathas to keep their hands to themselves when wandering amongst the construction-ridden streets over weekends. While Glen said that they’re trying to look at it in a “light-hearted way”, ultimately the goal of the campaign will be reminding people that “those cones are there both for their safety, and for the safety of other people.”
Depending on how well the campaign goes, Glen said, “maybe we'll offer an amnesty on road cones at the end of the year.” They also have old road signs lying around that could be free to a good home, depending on how nicely you ask. Get in quick!