Just a thought.

How is payment worked out? If the painters were given street names and told to paint yellow lines on those streets and those streets only, then you can blame the people who wrote the list. On the other hand, if the painters were told to paint yellow lines wherever they could inside a particular area of a town, then you blame the painters.

But then another question pops into my head. In the second option, if the painters were newly arrived immigrants from Poland or Romania, maybe they didn't know the meaning of the yellow lines. Maybe they were just told to paint yellow lines next to all the kerbs.