Anyone have any insight into why it takes so long to make road improvements as compared to building a large office building or hotel?
In my particular city, it is not uncommon for an official to proclaim that they will complete a widening of the highway for a few mile stretch over a 5 year period. There is one project in my city which consists of widening a large freeway for about 2 miles and adding adding four ramps at a interchange. It has been going on since 98 or 99 at least and there does not seem to be an end in sight. There seems to always be a crew working, even at night and on weekends. In that time of waiting in traffic, I have watched a fairly large office tower go up and start having tenants in what seemed to be in less than a year. A large hotel seemed to go up in about the same amount of time.
I understand that highway improvements are physically bigger projects, but they seem on the surface to be less complicated that getting a huge office tower built, furnished, and ready for use.
Does the state improve highways in long slow phases on purpose? Is there some financial advantage to doing it this way? Is it simply because they are handcuffed by having to have the roads open most of the time, so that they are forced to work on small sections over longer periods of time?
Once you’re out of the ground, vertical construction is generally very quick (depending on the complexity of the building design). It’s just a jigsaw puzzle.
Road construction can involve many issues such as right of way permits and easements, private property encroachments, hazmat surveys, extensive geo-technical testing, environmental impact statements, traffic studies, pubic notification and hearings, etc. The actual construction is ALL civil work, involving traffic rerouting, heavy equipment, compaction of each course of material, and lots of concrete (in the case of bridges and overpasses) and steel.
The public hearing process alone can be lengthy, depending on whether or not the proposed expansion is controversial or not.
Roads are generally funded by municipal or state bonds, which must be approved by voters, while buildings just require a developer and a bank.
Also, nobody uses buildings under construction – they wait until it’s done. Highways, OTOH, are usually being driven on during the improvements, and consideration must be made for the safety and convenience of the drivers. If they could just fence off the whole area and go to town, it would be much faster, though still not as fast as buildings. Buildings, you see, rarely have to deal with the heavy and fast-moving traffic from the cars that highways do.
I second this. You usually only notice a building under construction when the steel starts going up. And it looks done when the glass is on. Whereas a highway construction project is annoying even at just the surveying level.
That does seem odd. On this page, the first item listed is an interstate reconstruction project that started early this year and is expected to be complete in late 2005. That project includes complete reconstruction of 5 miles of interstate, including multiple ramps. Did they close entire lanes of traffic and ramps in order to rebuild them, or are they doing one lane at a time? It might be that they’re stretching it out in order to avoid affecting the commuters as much.
There are also reasons (some quite legitimate, some less so) to stretch out a major road construction over two or more years, when it could be done in one.
It’s easier to budget, fund and manage a series of smaller annual expenditures than a single large lump. This is especially important when multiple levels (federal, state, municipal) have to approve and fund various parts of the project – inevitably the case with interstates or major highways.
Accounting and construction oversight are more effective and easy to implement if a project takes place in distinct phases over time, rather than all at once (With all due respect to our friends in government and the construction industry, there is a long record of corruption, fund diversion, and substandard methods and materials on major government projects, despite many shining successes.) Whether excess oversight helps or not, bureaucracies love it. Besides “lowest bidder contracts”, by their nature, are more likely to go over budget than under, and it’s easier to manage or approve overages on a project that proceeds in phases over three years than one which is completed in six months
There are not enough huge construction projects every year to justify private purchase of excess equipment. There may be only a few dozen “24-ft graders” (an invented example) in the state. For commercial buildings, tight construction schedules save money by minimizing finance, liability, and other costs, and making it easier to line up firm tenant commitments. For a road, on the other hand, a more flexible construction schdule may save money. The equipment owner can charge 20% more to the private contractors who need it on specific weeks, and charge less to road construction, for a steady income stream between big gigs.
Commercial buildings are constructed when (and only when) there is an expectation of financial return. This creates an urgency. With few exceptions, roads don’t turn a profit, and they are built when- and where-ever the complex machine of public private factors blows a gasket and leaves an ink splotch on the map. This usually means substantial opposition, and far less urgency.
I used to work with someone who had retired from road construction, and here’s what he told me a couple years ago when I asked much the same question:
A factor affecting road construction is what they call “mob-demob” (pronounced with a long-o sound, rather than as an unruly mob)
It’s an abbreviation of mobilize-demobilize, and is a fancy term for getting your stuff in the morning and putting it away at the end of the day. In building construction, your “stuff” is typically carried on yourself in a tool belt - hammer, tape measure, etc. It’s hard to put a motor grader or bulldozer in your pocket, so before the end of your 8-hour workday, it has to be driven somewhere and parked. Likewise, at the start of the day, it needs to be located, fueled and driven to where it’s needed.
Mob-demob is part of a worker’s eight hours. Another realtive to it is coning. Someone has to set out the cones to keep drivers out of the work site. At the end of the day, someone probably has to retrieve them. Another time-eater.
Here in the Bay Area, there’s a road project that is severely complicated by being one of the busiest truck routes in the area. They can’t just shut down the road, so at something like 11PM, they start coning. As it’s a very busy area, they can’t just park their machines on the roadside, so they have to truck them in from wherever. End of day, reverse the whole mess and be out of there by 6AM. After the mob-demob, they get three hours of actual time to touch the road each day.
So, it comes down to - three hours of work per day are possible on this particular project vs a solid eight hours per day on a typical building.
Another factor is that in general, large highways are constructed to a higher quality standard than your average commercial building.
For example, most of the Interstate Highway system was originally built under President Eisenhower, more than 40 years ago. But it’s still there, and a lot of the original construction is still in use. Much of the ‘rebuilding’ work is actually additions, the original lanes are left with only minor changes.
Your average commercial building does not have to withstand nearly the same amount of “use” as a highway, and so is not built nearly as sturdy. And the planned lifetime of commercial buildings is often shorter than a highway.
Plus the builder is usually planning to sell the building to someone else, who will be responsible for maintenance over it’s lifetime. Highways will be owned by the government all their life, so they will over-build them if it reduces maintenance costs over many future years.
Howdy neighbor! In the time span that the interchange in question has already taken to build, I’ve graduated from High School, been engaged, graduated from College, been married, bought a house, changed cars and jobs several times, and then divorced. Occupations, automobiles and women come and go, but the backup at 290 & I-35 is forever…
Actually, the problem is that the concrete plant is on Ben White. They could have had the thing done in six months, but the trucks are still waiting for the light. No, I don’t have anything useful to add.
Road improvement projects are in fact hideously complicated projects. I’ve had the opportunity recently to study some projects of exactly this sort, and the level of complexity in project management, engineering, and planning is absolutely staggering.
Expanding a highway is a very complex task. First of all, engineering a road isn’t as easy as it looks; it’s actually a pretty complex job, from an engineering standpoint. You have to engineer the road from the bedrock up to ensure it’ll last and won’t crack apart the moment you get a frost of a fifty-ton rig rolls over it.
Roads LOOK simple. Roads may look like they just slap some asphalt on the ground, but they’re not. There is a real science to building an asphalt road that will withstand substantial weight loads and weather and remain safe to drive on. They’re really quite interesting little exercises in construction, and done wrong they won’t last and will have to be redone.
And you can’t just put a road down. You have to move light posts, signs, barriers, fill old ditches and create new ones, move storm sewers, plan out rain runoff, build new exit and entry ramps, route traffic, mobilize heavy equipment, install new signage, do traffic volume and flow studies… its dizzying. I recently reviewed a project involving the creation of an overpass. It took them over a year just to plan it, including the rendering of 3D models to show local residents what it would look like.