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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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.
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