History of road maintenance
From path maker to road manager
In the "Ordinance Concerning the Issuance of a Service Instruction for Landscape Road Makers," issued on April 26, 1890, § 3 orders:
"§ 3
Each landscape path maker shall be assigned a certain road section, which he shall at all times closely supervise with all objects belonging thereto, namely bridges, railings, walls, culverts, ditches, road trees, weir stones and weir posts, signposts, kilometer stones and boundary markers, and maintain them in the most complaint-free condition possible.
He has all on this route occurred remarkable incidents as soon as possible the road master mitzutheilen and according to circumstances to obtain a higher instruction."
This clearly regulated the organizational form of road maintenance.
The main roads of the time were built according to the principle of the famous road builder John Mc Adam and had a drained, load-bearing substructure. The top fine layer served as a wearing course. The road builder had to take care of the maintenance, water drainage and cleanliness of the wearing course, as well as the function of the road ditches, which ensured the drainage of the road body. A reasonable section of the road was given to him. In the following paragraphs of the above-mentioned regulation, technical and disciplinary instructions are given in all details, which for decades determined the service relationship of the road maker.
Wrongly imparted pedagogy has always greatly damaged the reputation of road maintenance and verbally degraded its function to the cleaning service of public facilities. However, road maintenance always provided the guarantee for maintaining the value of high public investments, which demanded expertise and dedication from every employee.
In order to accommodate the modest equipment, the path maker used to be provided with an equally modest room. In bad weather, the also performed indoor services, such as straightening materials for enclosures, drainage and the like, as well as maintenance work on tools. Seen in this way, these shelters or sheds formed work yards for road sections.
With the acquisition of vehicles, machines and superstructures that could cover large distances with special operations, the stationing places of these units acquired central importance and the idea of the centralized works yard had to come. As a result, task forces and individual missions developed that served entire road networks. These mobilities, however, demanded new organizational and operational structures with requirements that the service instruction of 1890 could no longer meet.
But even after the introduction of modern organizational structures, individual trailblazers retained their sections of road, and rented small premises were also retained in the absence of suitable work yards. Over time, certain concentrations were formed, but a clear division into largely independent maintenance districts could not yet be realized.
When this division into the three districts of Oberland, Triesenberg and Unterland was accomplished, the modern era of Liechtenstein road maintenance began with the construction of the Werkhof Vaduz in 1964. However, it was to take more than two decades before the Bendern depot could be put into operation in the Unterland in 1982 and the reorganization was completed with the opening of the Triesenberg depot in 1987.