Blundering Chinese officials were forced to cut a motorway in half to go around a block of flats. They accidentally erected the building in its proposed path, then realised it would cost too much to relocate the tenants.
Construction workers had to squeeze the eight-lane highway into four and subsequently left furious residents stuck in the middle of a busy road. They had just been moved from their previous homes to make way for a park, so refused to move again unless they were heavily compensated. Thus, the council decided to save a small fortune by leaving the flats in place.
Resident Shing Su, who lives in the block in Xi'an, Shaanxi province in western China, said: "We all lived in another area where they were building the Daming National Heritage Park, and they promised to put us up in a new, modern block of flats, so we ended up here. But we had only been here a few months when they found that they had built one block too many, and that it was on the place where there was supposed to be a new highway."
The council then started negotiations with the tenants, but with their new, modern flats they wanted even more compensation. After several months of failed negotiations, the council simply gave up and built around the problem. But the road has been branded a waste of time, and money as it has done little to solve the problem of rush-hour congestion that it was designed to solve.
Mr Shing added: "We don't exactly like being stuck out in the middle of a 60 metre-wide highway, but you get used to it. If they make a decent offer most would move, but it's hard as it seems we had only settled here when we were asked to move."
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