I was told once it’s because cities project the job to take say 5 weeks, so they rip it up the first week, leave it for 3 weeks, then repave the last week. And they do this so everyone gets a paycheck for the full 5 weeks. Surely there has to be a different reason?
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Those who do the ripping up aren’t always the same workers who do the paving. Those who do the paving may be completing another job at the exact time a street becomes newly ripped up. It’s simply a matter of the timing. I’ve experienced what you’re describing, but never something as long as 3 weeks. Maybe 3 or 4 days before the pavers come in.
Jobs like this are bid on. The company says they can do it for $500,000. They anticipate 5 weeks.
They could experience delays that prevent a five week completion. Weather can delay it.
They get paid $500,000 if it takes five weeks, if it takes seven weeks, if it takes three weeks. The people working the job are paid however they are paid, usually not per hour or per day, but by the job. It largely behooves people to finish the job as quickly as they can, but they can’t throw caution to the wind or perform truly shoddy work that’ll last two years before it needs replacement again, else they won’t ever be hired to do jobs again.
Usually there’s more to a road repair than simply the road, too. You’ve got it all torn up. Sewer lines, gas lines, everything buried and covered by that road is now accessible…best repair or replace whatever needs work done while you’ve got easy access.
It’s either scheduling conflicts/planning, or other work needing to be done.
Like i’ve had my nearby road worked on several times because of other infrastructure projects, and they put down fresh pavement and a week later start cutting into it again to reach under-road pipes and other key things. So they did a great job on the road… and fucked it immediately. Really short sighted nonsense.
So to avoid that, they may rip up an old road but leave it like that for a few weeks and what you don’t notice is the small crews coming at night to dig down to a pipe or route a cable or whatever. They do all that bullshit and finish up as much as possible before they commit to finishing the road.
Where I live we get winters so roads dont last long and we redo them all the time… if you live in an area without harsh winters, they really just want to do the road right and complete it once and then it’s good for many years with just slight patching over time.
The other problem is scheduling like i said at first. Your town has let’s say 5 crews, but you have to redo 80 roads. So it’s hot potato of shifting crews around constantly. So they might dig a road up, but then be assigned to another road that had complications or just takes priority, and then they return to the first road a few weeks later.
It’s not just the crews, but also the equipment. They dont have 50 crews, and they don’t have 50 full sets of heavy equipment.
Has nothing to do with people getting a paycheck.
When I was running municipal resurfacing contracts, this was our standard order of operations:
-concrete guys come in and upgrade ADA ramps and repair all curb/gutter, usually a week or so
-milling contractor comes to mill off the first layer of asphalt (ripped up road), usually 1-5 days
-patch any weak spots in the asphalt, 1-5 days
-paving contractor paves, 1-5 days
-if any striping needs to be done, stripers come in right after asphalt is paved
Sometimes the milling guys can’t come in immediately after concrete, sometimes the paving crew isn’t available for a week or two after milling/patching. There is alot of coordination between multiple contractors, available working times, and property owners/business owners that will stretch out work as well.
Another very important part of roads is the dirt underneath it, it has to be properly compacted and graded so the road doesn’t immediately get destroyed. Soil compaction is a slow process, taking multiple passes with up to a few days between them, depending on the type of soil you have. That’s most of the time you see “nothing happening” on road projects.
Nothing to do with paychecks. Usually the ripping (milling) is done by a separate company than the paving company.
I manage resurfacing for my municipality. We don’t allow the milling crews to get more than 3-4 days ahead of the paving crew. It’s an eye sore to the residents and also opens us up to risk for our subgrade to get destroyed.
Here in NYC they leave the street torn up to allow utilities to do any work they may need to do before it gets repaved. They don’t want the street torn up again soon after so they give the utilities a few weeks to get their work done.
I looked into it after spending weeks having to take a detour on my bike ride to avoid torn up streets.
I work for a large heavy-highway paving contractor in the southeastern US. While some of the factors mentioned previously are part of the equation there is generally a more obvious answer. Typically, the paving contractor can get more asphalt placed in one shift if they don’t have to worry about the milling of the road (“ripping the road up”) in the same shift. Unless the contract specifically states the road must be paved the same days it’s “ripped up”, we typically will mill the road up and call in the painters at the end of the shift to paint back the lines on the milled surface. Once all of the milling is done, the contractor will schedule the paving to take place. This allows us to use the same trucks that carried the milled asphalt off the road in the ripping stage to carry new hot mix asphalt to place the new road. This helps with 2 things. 1) dump trucks are an important resource & sometimes scarce commodity that need to be managed accordingly. 2) with the road already being milled there is no waiting on the milling of the road to take place before we can start to pave. If we have to mill and pave the road in the same shift the milling starts at the beginning of the shift, let’s say 7:30 am and you will stop milling around 2:00 pm so the paving operations has time to “catch up” at the end of the shift. The actual paving wouldn’t start until 9:30 or 10:00 am and you would pave until 5:00 pm. If the milling has already occurred days or weeks prior, the paving can start @ 7:30 am and pave until 5:00 pm and you have an additional 2+ hrs of paving time. The additional paving time = more asphalt placed in one shift = more production = more profit.
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Around here it seems like they will rip up about 5 miles of road. It comes up a hell of a lot faster than it goes back down, so the project takes all summer.
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