Bad Neighbor Chronicles: Dangerous Road Obstacles Created by Shoddy Chunghwa Telecom Roadworks

A few days ago, contractors working for Chunghwa Telecom showed up on the street outside my old family home in Tamsui for road construction. They excavated the road into a pitted mess before repaving the entire stretch with fresh asphalt.

Watching the preparatory roadwork outside, a hopeful thought surfaced in my mind: would they finally take this opportunity to chisel away that hazardous concrete curb (a makeshift cement hump) illegally poured beside the roadway years ago?

Speaking of this cancerous cement hump, it has been an eyesore for years. Because nowhere else along the entire street features such bizarre construction, I have every reason to suspect our serial-offending next-door neighbors. Taking advantage of our inattention during a past drainage pipeline project, they secretly poured a 60-centimeter-long protruding concrete barrier right on the asphalt in front of my house (the exact spot concealed under the solid red traffic cone in the hero photo).

The sole function of this rogue concrete ridge is keeping rainwater and gutter runoff from trickling down the slope past their own front door (they sit directly downhill from us). As a result, whenever water flows down the road, it is forcibly diverted diagonally across from my house to the opposite sidewalk.

The problem with this hazardous slapdash construction is that it causes filthy wastewater to pool in the depression directly in front of the hump. This concrete lump not only makes the street ugly and uneven, but stands as a monument to sheer, unadulterated neighborhood selfishness.

And their obstruction went beyond deflecting runoff: a quick look down the street reveals that storm drain grates are spaced out at regular intervals everywhere—except in front of their house, where grates are conspicuously absent. One can only imagine how much fuss their family kicked up during the original sewerage project to block municipal engineers from installing a drain outside their home. And shockingly, they succeeded.

Incredibly, during this latest repaving, not only was the old concrete hump spared, but contractors poured an even wider concrete platform right beside it, jacking up the barrier’s height even further. It has metastasized across the asphalt like a malignant tumor, escalating into an outright speed bump obstacle.

What’s worse, the height disparity of this newly poured concrete is even more severe. Pedestrians risk twisting an ankle simply walking past, while passing scooters risk scraping their center stands or bottoming out their chassis—or even wiping out entirely. (The old hump also had uneven grade steps; someone previously patched one side with discarded rubble, but the neighbor’s side remained jagged, likely because their elderly matriarch always bustled outside to micromanage road crews.)

Well, a household like our next-door neighbors certainly qualifies as textbook “bad neighbors,” wouldn’t you say? In fact, their family history across three generations is packed with colorful feuds—I’ll find time to share those stories with everyone down the road.