Painting a busy street

Today I went to the market again, since we were running low on food, a situation that requires urgent attention, as running OUT of food is not a good thing. Anyhow, I loaded up on the essentials, cherries, avocados, pineapples, green beans, carrots, broccoli, bananas, lemons, and toilet paper. Yes, I know that the last one is different than all the others, but we still didn't want to run out.

After buying all this stuff, I still had a little money left, so I stopped for lunch at a place I had noticed on the way into the market. For only $1.50, they gave me all the food in this picture, although the soup was considerably depleted before I took the picture.
After eating lunch, I waited at the bus stop, and watched a crew from the city who blocked off a lane of traffic on each side of the street so they could repaint the crosswalks. I don't know why they bother - the pedestrians never pay attention to them, and the drivers don't either. The drivers will try to avoid hitting pedestrians, and the pedestrians try to avoid being hit, but the location of crosswalks is irrelevant to the whole equation.

In any case, the crew blocked off a lane each way using empty 5-gallon paint buckets, painted bright yellow. This caused considerable congestion, but most of the drivers were coping fairly well. However, one man in an SUV made a left turn while checking to his right to avoid a collision, and ran right over one of the buckets. It got jammed under his engine, and made an awful racket, throwing off sparks as he headed on down the street. From inside, I suspect it sounded like his engine had fallen out, so he pulled over about a hundred yards down to see what the problem was. As soon as he saw what it was, he pulled up on the curb with his right tires, lifting his SUV off of the bucket and letting him drive away. Here is a partial view of the can as a helpful bystander brought it back.
In the meanwhile, a passing bus ran over another can, and just flattened it, such that a couple of other drivers that I observed ran over the flattened can, wincing visibly as they heard the clatter-bump under their vehicle. In the meanwhile, the workers seemed almost oblivious to the fact that their traffic-control cans were suffering some attrition. Here is a picture of the one that was flattened.
At this point, my bus arrived, so I left this happy scene.

On another note, I can add another detail to the mystery across the street. Apparently the residents of the houses across the street are also the ones who blocked off the gates. I say this because the pickup that was used to bring the bricks for blocking off the gates was being used today to load up some of the stuff in the bay on the far left. I have no idea where they are taking stuff, but apparently they are preparing for the day that they move out.

I need to go cut up a pineapple so it will be ready for breakfast, so I'll sign off for now.