Take a look at this picture? Notice anything odd?

Yes, that’s it. They’ve created a small patch of cleared snow on the steps and left all the rest of the snow untreated. Completely untreated.

For those that don’t recognise it, this is the Excel centre – a major exhibition space – as you would approach it if you followed the pedestrian route from Canning Town, a station on the Jubilee Tube Line and Docklands Light Railway. At Canning Town I was offered a DLR train, every 28 minutes, or the “pedestrian route to Excel” which was signposted every few yards. That route is 1 mile long, or a 20 minute walk. 20 is less than 28 so off we went, expecting that this route will have been cleared – it wasn’t, as you can see.

I doubt the frequency of trains was much different from usual and the branded signs will have cost a packet to have installed and maintained at Canning Town as they would on lamp posts along the route as well. They put all that effort into giving visitors a pedestrian option, but nobody took the initiative to clean the square, the path, the pavement over the viaduct or the main road through to Canning Town. Instead, they opened the health and safety manual to the page marked “snow” and cleaned to the bottom their steps as instructed. Then they stopped dead. Not a single inch of that square had been cleared and you can see it got a good amount of pedestrian traffic that day.

Perhaps it was a bit much to expect a mile long path to be treated (though they did have two shows on), but to have found such a pathetically small area that had been cleared, and within such a tight boundary shows a staggering lack of initiative, or some strong barrier or disincentive at work. I suspect it is actually the latter. I wrote yesterday about how the Councils crowding out and non-objective national laws affect individuals, it seems corporations are equally put off. Each person who thinks “the paths will be untreated and the DLR is so slow” is a person who isn’t going to buy a Couture wedding dress or a Ducati motorcycle, representing hundreds of pounds of lost revenue for the venue’s clients. Simple empathy and the profit motive are not overcoming the disincentives of legal risk and the natural expectation that “the Council will do it, won’t they?”. This could be how society evolves an effective non-state solution, instead, the result of this suppressed motivation is evident in the infantilised actions this corporation took.