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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It can be for a variety of reasons. Sometimes just scheduling, sometimes asphalt availability, sometimes damage to underlying utilities is caused or uncovered by the grinding equipment.
>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?
Whoever told you that is an idiot.
I do road construction.
95% of the time, it’s just scheduling.
Sometimes we do get everything done quickly, with crews coming in back to back, but that’s only if the contract requires it.
Otherwise, the milling crew will come first, and then the paving crew comes whenever it works in the schedule.
That also includes waiting on confirmation from the client, or an engineer’s report or some other thing that’s out of our control.
We’ve had jobs that were supposed to be done in 2 weeks, only for them to delay or postpone it, and the road staying milled for over a year.
Like others have said, it’s mainly timing between two separate crews of people. There usually isn’t a mechanical reason they can’t get right on the road and repave it after milling it off. Only time there IS a reason that I can think of is when they are mixing cement powder into the ground under the road – that needs time to set and solidify before paving on it.
That being said, in my city we require the road to be fully paved within 2 weeks after its been ripped up. Every day after those two weeks that it isn’t paved incurs a fine on the contractor.
A lot of it is timing and delays. If you’re putting up a building you need to have the people and materials in the same place at the same time. But not TOO many people, or TOO much materials. Cashflow is important so you can’t really afford to buy all your materials at once and still pay workers and utilities. At the same time you don’t want workers standing around for materials that aren’t being used.
If you delay the materials to when you need them, the workers might not be available to install them. When you have the workers, maybe the materials aren’t available. You need the right materials and the right people to be in the same place at the same time. Any time any one of those is delayed, it can cause a domino effect the push back the rest of the project.
As others have said, there are several different/separate crews for each phase of the project; not every person can do every task.
Then, don’t lose sight of the fact that there are 25 separate repaving projects going on at once, not exactly at the same time, but phased — crews move from one to the next to the next to the next, doing all of the milling, then all of the filling, then all of the compacting, then finally all of the paving.
And some other crew — probably some other -company- is responsible for setting up signage in advance, and taking it down afterwards, and setting up jersey barriers if needed. And if they’re needed, then you have to have a sub-sub-contractor deliver the barriers and unload them to a staging area, then someone else set them up.
And if you need a milling machine, it has to be delivered to the site, and unloaded; this takes time. An area must be blocked off for the flatbed truck to park, and enough working space to move the machine, and park it where it won’t be in the way of other equipment. And at the end of one job site, allow a day for the truck to come back and load up the machine, and chain it down, and move it to the next site. Logistics, logistics, logistics.
And what’s the **biggest mistake** you can have on such a project? Having the crew and machine show up for one phase, but the site isn’t ready. Something delayed a previous step, so that’s going to propagate a delay throughout all the rest of the sites — unless you build in some buffer.
(Remember, this is not exactly ad hoc — it was LAST YEAR when the contractor ordered the milling machine to be delivered on ONE SPECIFIC DAY, and to be picked up 4 days later. Because “delivering the machine” also requires scheduling a truck, and trailer, and specialized driver. If you were thinking someone just went over the public works warehouse that morning and checked out a milling machine … that’s NOT the way it works.)
So, a certain amount of padding is built into every piece of the schedule — a “rain day” here and there. But, if you don’t need that buffer, then nothing happens on that day. Just so that the guy and his truck who were scheduled to show up at the site on Tuesday to pick up the machine, don’t have to get rescheduled for Thursday.
It’s a CRAZY amount of logistics. You’re only seeing a small part of the picture.
Different contractors.
In a perfect word it happens with timed perfection but you know what kind of world it is.
Stuff could need to be relocated due to lines being too high if the road needs to be stabilized they could tear it up but more often then not it’s a scheduling conflicted
The government is wildly innefficient. Construction contractors are wildly innefficient. Put them together and you get a mess
You rip up the whole stretch then place the whole stretch. It might seem like nothings going on but they might just be further down the road
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