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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I live on a dead end street with about 20 houses and they just repaved the road. It took about 6 weeks total with 3 separate ‘working sessions’ of about 2-3 days each to get it done. Based on what they told us in the neighborhood this is how it worked. First, the main reason they couldn’t just get it done all at one time was because after the first session where they ripped up all the old asphalt and put down the first layer of new asphalt, they said they had to wait a couple of weeks to let cars drive on it to see if there were any soft spots in the road. I will also mention there were a number of different paving jobs all over our general area at the same time so timing and coordination played a part in moving equipment and people around. When they came back the second time someone marked the places in the street that needed to be ripped up again and redone, based on how the road responded to cars driving over it, and then they laid down new asphalt in those places. They let this sit for about 2 weeks and then they just put down the final layer last week. So the reason it took as long as it did was because they had to do it in stages plus they had to coordinate resources between a dozen other jobs that were happening at the same time.
Ideally, it’s to allow operators of underground utility lines to perform needed repairs or maintenance on those lines.
Man…. unrelated, i know some countries like Japan and (I think) Netherlands, pays for roadwork completed only so there’s a huge incentive to not delay on fixing things.
Those people are not city employees, they are employees of whichever company the city contracted. Put yourself in the shoes of the owner of that company. You can either hire some people to work full time or twice as many people to work every other week. They need to pace their work out so that they can maintain a constant level of employment and income.
It’s not necessarily about working slowly, but taking on the right number is jobs and having the right number of employees. Then they can provide the lowest bid and win the contract.
Grady over at Practical Engineering YouTube channel discusses it occasionally. We could do things much faster is we wanted, it’s not hard, but it is MUCH more expensive.
They often do other work on the infrastructure once the paving is up…. putting in new storm drains, running wiring underground, replacing curbs and sidewalks (which comes before repaving). I metal detect for a hobby and torn up streets are one of the favorite places for it, so we get to see the work being done. They are most certainly **not** just sitting on their asses because the city scheduled more time than the job needed.
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
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
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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