A new paper from the School of Emergent Priorities tracks 41 taped floor-arrow detours across nine shopping strips for 18 months, finding a works order's stated removal deadline has no bearing on how long the marking actually stays up.
An 18-month survey of nine shopping strips finds a works order's own removal deadline makes no difference to how long the tape stays up
A strip of tape laid down to steer pedestrians around a footpath resurfacing job is authorised for exactly one purpose: surviving the job. A new paper from the School of Emergent Priorities finds it usually outlives that purpose by months.
Professor Verity Marris, Dr Marek Solheim, and Dr Lindiwe Achterberg tracked 41 taped arrow-sets across nine shopping strips for eighteen months, checking each set’s continued presence against the works order that authorised it. Where a removal deadline was specified at all, it made no measurable difference to how long a set survived. Most of the removals that did happen came about only when unrelated roadworks returned to the same stretch of footpath, not because anyone had reviewed the marking itself.
A works order gets a job done and stops there. Nobody wrote down whose job it was to notice the tape was still up.
— Professor Verity Marris, Director, Trajectory Analytics Group, School of Emergent Priorities
“The interesting question now is who a works order should name as responsible once the crew has gone,” said Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities. “At the moment, the answer is nobody, and the tape just stays up.”
The finding extends the School’s long-running interest in the conditions institutions attach to their own temporary measures, and in what happens once those conditions are no longer anyone’s to check.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ic6zdv.