Years ago, near our house and on my route to work, they went from an old crappy two lane road to a brand new 5 lane in each direction boulevard. Yeah!
They finished it and it was great - for about a week.
It has been at least 4-5 years now, and I can count the days on one hand where there has not been construction and orange cones to send you off in yet one more new detour.
The asphalt was barely dry before they decided to dig it up and cut through with a new water line. That fixed, they then ripped it up to add more pipes underneath (couldn’t they have spoken with the utilities companies BEFORE they built this?) and then they decided to make changes to the shoulders of the road and then a bridge for pedestrians and, and, and…
As mentioned, this road has now been under construction for at least 4 years, non-stop - although you would be hard pressed to see an actual working body do anything, no matter when you drive by - but those orange cones are out there by the thousands.
Do you have any eternally-under-construction roads near you?
When I was younger my father used to joke that I would move as soon as construction was finished in an area to a new place that was just beginning road work.
In my defense I was living in Ottawa and I believe that the entire city is perpetually under construction.
Michigan has four seasons - muddy construction, construction, muddy construction and winter.
Mind you, people complain about bad roads, then they complain when the roads are being fixed…surface streets are not a big deal, because one can usually detour around them. Freeways under construction are a much bigger pain in the ass.
Fuckin’ A yes. How about the little street right in front of my freaking condo. Something about the water pipes, or regrading, or whatever the next thing is, for a long ass time. Bunch of jerks, too, this current group of street tearer-uppers.
What bugs me is the constant repaving of certain roads. They put a 2" lift on the asphalt and all the many faults below soon telegraph up and damage the paving. If it’s not under construction, it’s tearing up your vehicle. A big expressway project in the big city shut it down for months for a total roadbed replacement. It finished two months ago. Last week there was a heavy rain and the road had 3’ of water/mud over stretches. The road was closed for two days. Some vehicles lost engines. Many more were inconvenienced.
Even the bike path surface was not prepared and it showed cracks the next day. Grass and weeds will be punching through next summer. If we could farm this work out to China we’d have somebody to complain to.
The Gulf Freeway, for anyone who has lived in Houston in the last half century or so. Construction ended in 1998, but does anyone remember a time before then that it wasn’t under construction? I learned to drive around 1980. Until I moved away in 1988, the lanes narrowed down to less than eight feet wide between downtown and the Loop.
They started working on it when I was sixteen. I’m almost 25 and it’s still a total and completely unbelievable mess. It’s downright dangerous at times, weaving and crazy swerving needed just to not kill yourself or oncoming cars. I think it was due to take 4 years to start out with.
I’ve lived in several cities in northern CA in recent years, and most of them were like this.
There’s ALWAYS a bunch of streets under construction, often including the streets you might think of using instead. So one couldn’t find alternate routes that were any better.
And here’s another thing that galls me about all the construction: It takes SO Og-damned long! They grind up the surface, then leave it like that for six weeks. Then spray oil and gravel on the surface and leave it like that for another six weeks. Then put a new layer of asphalt, and leave that for a few more weeks. Then paint the lines, and tear up some intersections to install lights or whatever.
You get the idea. They do a job in little pieces, with long stretches of dead time in between (during which, the crews are presumably doing the same on other constructions projects all over town).
I’ll give credit here to one decent counter-example: A few years ago they widened a stretch of US 101 from Rohnert Park to Santa Rosa, CA. It was a mess while they did it, but they worked on it full-time until it was done, and got it done faster than scheduled (and, IIRC, under budget). You don’t see THAT happening every day!
The 880/237 interchange in Milpitas, CA was under construction for years - I don’t recall a time it wasn’t. I left the area in '05, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out it’s still going on.
Here in Portland, the 26/217 interchange has been under constant construction for the past three years or so. It looks like it’s almost done, but I’m sure they’ll start up right up again on something else.
I live in central FL but drive I-95 in Georgia several times a year. It was heavily under construction* for around a decade, and only in the past couple years has the construction zone level dwindle down to “average”. Previously, around half of the miles on I-95 in GA were technically in a construction zone and many of those miles had the full-scale cones and barriers deal.
*As opposed to, say “under heavy construction” because at that pace one would think the construction wasn’t all that heavy most of the time!
The Borman Expressway (I-80 / I-94) in northwestern Indiana was under construction for many years in the early part of the 2000s. Then, to add insult to injury, Illinois decided to rebuild their stretch of that road, just west of the state line. All of that is done, but now Indiana has been rebuilding the interchange between 80/94 and I-65 for two or three years now, and that sucker still wasn’t done the last time I went through there, a couple of months ago.
In short, the stretch of road from around the I-80 / I-294 interchange in Illinois, to the I-80/94 / I-65 interchange in Indiana, seems to have been under construction, at some point in the route, for at least a decade now.
DC Metro area (Northern Virginia). First there was the Mixing Bowl, or as we called it “Malfunction Junction”, which was an 8ish year project.
Now that it’s done (and as long as you don’t try to figure out where every knot in the tangle of roads is going), it’s actually improved. However, it is literally the only stretch of the Beltway in Virginia that is not under construction. The Wilson Bridge was finished several years ago but the reconstruction of the interchanges on the Virginia side continues on.
Then you go the other way on the Beltway and it’s pretty much a clusterfuck the entire distance to the Maryland border. Stretches of sudden lane shifts, changing exits… I’ve lived here 23 years and still missed my exit recently… Egad.
Basically there’s been some form of MAJOR construction going on for the last 12 years and I see no end in sight.
I drive to Santa Fe a couple of times a year, and have been for about six years now. They’ve been doing construction on that stretch of highway for the entire time, I swear.
That’s completed now. But it’s a weird interchange. If you only drive through it occasionally and you aren’t real familiar with it, there’s a high chance that you make a wrong turn somewhere.
Just a few miles up the road, the eternal construction of the 880/92 interchange (leading to the San Mateo Bridge) eternally continues.
The latest other eternal freeway construction seems to be I-580 in the Livermore area. It appears to be a combination of widening it, along with building an interchange with the lately-rerouted SR-84.
Another interchange long-time-in-the-making that has finally been completed is the I-680/SR-24 interchange (Walnut Creek area).
The tiny little crescent outside my window has now been roadwork-free for 8 months. For the six years prior, it was dug up at least once a month; I used to ask why they were doing it and how long they’d be there, so I could plan my work schedule, but the workers were almost always bizarrely rude and wouldn’t tell me, so I don’t know most of the reasons. This is on top of 2 and a half years of continuous roadworks and a HUGE building site.
It was often disruptive enough to make things fall off my windowsills - it was, seriously, driving me crazy. 7am to 5pm weekdays, 7am to 1pm Saturdays. I work from home in a job that requires me to hear things and often had to wait till the end of their work day before I could start mine. Often you couldn’t hear someone sitting on the next sofa or hear the TV, the drilling was so loud.
It also cuts off my exit from the courtyard (they rope off the pavement and the gate - there is another exit, TBF, but far enough away to be inconvenient) as well as road access.
The last time the drills came out I wept hysterically. Once I’d calmed down I tried to ask how long they’d be there, but they simply stonewalled me. I know that I look and act like a nice middle-class mid-thirties woman, not a crazy or anything, and it’s not an unreasonable question - their reactions are just weird.
This probably makes me sound a little insane, but being woken every day by drilling for years, and never knowing when it’s going to end, can do that to you.
I also live in an Olympic borough. That’s getting Crossrail. A major road without roadworks is noteworthy.
I am 42 years old, and literally do not remember a time when Savannah, Georgia’s Truman Parkway was not under construction. Seriously. (At one memorable point, some wetlands issues held up one phase of construction. After those issues were settled, just before the bulldozers moved in, a nest of bald eagles was found right in the projected path.) Currently, the parkway is slated for “completion” in 2013, but the city has sprawled so much since plans were drawn up that the connection will dump onto the busiest section of the busiest surface street in town - a surface street that bottlenecks on a too-small bridge and another bypass interchange and a chronically gridlocked section within just a short distance. So theI current phase will almost cecertainly not be the last. It would be funny, except … not.
For the six years prior, it was dug up at least once a month; I used to ask why they were doing it and how long they’d be there, so I could plan my work schedule, but the workers were almost always bizarrely rude and wouldn’t tell me, so I don’t know most of the reasons. This is on top of 2 and a half years of continuous roadworks and a HUGE building site.
A major road without roadworks is noteworthy.