I realize that by definition it’s a major construction project, but whenever I see a 1000-foot stretch of highway closed down so that three or four trucks can repair that stretch of highway and then move on to the next 1000-foot stretch of highway when they’ve finished, etc., I wonder why the government doesn’t hire 30 truckloads of workers to do 10,000 feet at a time, or 300 truckloads to do 100,000 feet at a time. The only real difference, it seems to me, is not in the man/hours, which would be the same, but in the time needed to complete the project. it would make a tremendous difference in the quality of life, IMO, if a highway needed to be reduced to a single lane for a week as opposed to six months’ time, but the gummint always goes for the relatively small crews and the relatively long periods of time. Why is that?
It’s not man hours…it’s truck/equipment hours.
Every man needs to have equipment.
You are correct that it is just as cheap to pay 10 guys for 10 hours or work as it is to pay 100 guys for 1 hour of work, but if each guy needs his own truck, the cost of the required trucks would be A LOT higher for 100 guys.
Also, you have to keep in mind that road crew workers are generally highly skilled laborers (not a huge labor pool) and there should always be keen attention to safety on the roads (really at any construction project) so having less people out there protects drivers and workers–less people, less chance for injury.
Finally, at least in the US, never underestimate the importance of unions. It is possible that the government has, through the course of union negotiations, given up the right to hire 100 guys to do the job faster.
Having cash on hand to pay for the big crew all at once comes to mind. If you stretch the project out, your payroll per month is smaller. If the local cash flow is kind of weak in a town, then it makes perfect sense.
I’d expect pretty much the same thing happens on federal projects. The fed has only so much to spend, and doesn’t want to dump it on one spot all at once.
There’s also the question of getting work crews together for a single large job. Small crews you can round up locally, and the slow work pace keeps the locals employed longer. Not that I mean that they are draggin their feet. It’s just that a smaller crew takes longer to get the job done. Larger crews would have to be brough in and transported from job to job - and that costs bucks.
Then there’s just plain being slow pokes and taking inefficient ways to accomplish the job. They’ve been working on about 200 yards of retaining wall along the highway I drive to work. They are building forms and casting concrete in place and having to build little access roads to get heavy equipment around to where they want to work. They could have used precast concrete pieces, but that wouldn’t look cool enough. The ones that they are casting in place have great big inset fields that they will set rock in mortar in when the wall itself is done. Six months to date, and they haven’t got the walls up - and never mind the rocks.
Precast pieces is how they rebuilt the I-40/I-25 interchange in under two years. It was really an amazing bit of road construction.
Those workers you see are not govt. employees, they work for the private contractor and sub-contractors that bid and won the contract to perform the work in a specified length of time for a specified amount of money. There are penalties for lateness (non-weather related) and probably bonuses for early completion. The govt. employees are the ones just walking around looking, maybe holding a clipboard or copy of the blueprints.
I think federal contracts fall under the Davis-Bacon Act which makes using union shops mandatory. State and local contracts may or may not use union shops depending on the laws of the state.
Roadwork does seem to take forever but just think how nice the finished product is for about six months 'till they start tearing it out to do something else.
I have a friend who works for PennDOT. I once mentioned that nothing seems to happen for weeks and weeks and then BOOM they seem to finish a stretch of road in a few days. My friend tells me that this is often a scheduling issue. One crew comes and tears up the highway, but the crew who will be laying the new one down is scheduled elsewhere. Delays on another site 'cause delays on this one and it spirals. Anyway, that was his explanation.
It’s not just a matter of personnel/equipment avilability, as others have stated, it’s also a matter of material availability. You may well have the ability to employ lots of folks, but that doesn’t mean you can get all the asphalt/concrete/aggregate base they need to do the job every day.
For instance, I have a project to construct erosion controls along a River. I need around 30,000 m3 of 1/2-ton RSP. However, I can only get around 3,000 m3/day because of supply restrictions.
–Patch
Respectfully, may I suggest that if a contractor can’t figure out the logistics to solve this simple problem above, they should be fired for incompetence. A low-level logistician at the Pentagon could resolve this during his lunch hour.
No one has really spoken to the spirit of the OP. To wit, why do local/county/state governments (and their contractors) do things with such fantastic inefficiency? I’ve read the objections above, but the underlying issue seems to be that the government does it that way because they’ve always done it that way. They have a manana work ethic. Are any of the posters above suggesting such large-scale construction projects could not be done far more time-efficiently, all things considered? I’ve seen hundreds of highway projects underway–oftentimes while stuck in traffic for hours–and I’ve never seen these workers really do much of anything. A good 90 percent of their work involves milling about, shooting the breeze, taking lengthy breaks, looking at the miles of gridlocked commuters–and, of course, leaving out traffic pylons for miles and miles when, given the road crew’s demonstrated lack of productivity, it simply cannot be justified. (Project management seems third-rate, at best.) I’m sure much of the inefficiencies can be chalked up to union workers being overseen by government supervisors–a losing proposition if there ever were one. With rare exceptions, the system is broken and neither the government nor their construction companies show the slightest inclinication of fixing it.
::stuyguy applauds agrees with Country Squire’s post::
hijack:
Is the pay very good for “starting out” construction workers. If someone working through a state construction works there for a number of years can they build up a good salary? What is the average salary for construction workers? Here in Texas I’ve always heard that construction was a very hard job and low paying. Is that true?
I’ve got this funny feeling that you think you can buy unlimited quantities of 1/2-ton rock at your local hardware store. There are a limited number of places one can obtain rock of this size, and I’m not the only construction project in the state.
Having been on several highway construction projects, I can say that the workers I’ve seen are out there working. If you have a problem with what’s happening out there, call your local DOT Public Affairs office, find out who the Resident Engineer is for that job, and give them a call. There’s more going on out there than you know.
–Patch
I’m thinking of that scene in “Cool Hand Luke” when they all decide to see how fast they can tar that road.
Let me answer this as a former civil engineer.
Any project can be done:
Cheep
Fast
Well
but you can only pick two of the three (actually you can have some of each but you get the idea).
To complete the project, you need:
labor
equipment
materials
Not everything is always available when you want it. There are are also things that you can’t control that affect your timetable (like the drying time for concrete).
A construction project is not a single entity. There are dozens of contractors, subcontractors, engineers, inspectors, drivers, skilled and unskilled laborers, equipment operators, all of which have to be coordinated. It doesn’t make sense to have a dozen steamrollers hanging around if you can only find one pavement-making machine.
Whether it is actually more or less innefficient than private sector work is hard to say. It certainly appears so, then again, you don’t have to drive past me while I’m working. If you saw us in my last job taking 1.5 hour lunches and 5 coffee breaks a day, you might say the same thing.
If you built them right, you wouldnt need to repair them so often.
I heard that the German autobahn lasted many many years, the nazi german original concrete, which was thicker and better quality concrete.
In america, we use “low cost” bidding, affirmative action, cheap materials, etc.
Construction companies are not required to guarantee their work, they do not have to post a bond to fix it for free if it doesnt last for 10 or more years.
Ahhh…there’s nothing like Nazi workcamp craftsmanship. If only we had more Polish slave labor in this country.
Have you considered the reason there are a “limited number of places that one can obtain rocks of this size, yadda yadda,” is because there has never been a demand for larger amounts? When you’re talking something as ubiquitous as, um, rocks (not exactly a precious commodity), supply follows demand. IOW, supply mirrors demand.
Re: point two: Your experience flies in the face of that experienced by tens of millions of Americans who have had the singular displeasure of being snarled in gridlocked traffic.
I’m talking experience expressed across every conceivable domain: geographic, seasonal, temporal, longitudinal, etc. This pokey production schedule isn’t a new phenomenon. Rather, the singular lack of productivity among highways workers–huge segments of downtime that would never be allowed in other industries–is a phenomenon that dates back decades.
I’m not sure I understand the problem. It looks like you can get all you need within 2 weeks. A highway project that was finished in 2 weeks would be celebrated by citizens across the country.
I don’t see workers slacking off at all, really. What I do see, however, is stretches of road that are worked on for a while by a given crew, and then left partially completed for the next stage of construction. After some time, maybe even months, the next crew comes in and performs their stage of the pipeline. And then more time passes by. Repeat.
Requiring that a contractor must be finishing up one project just in time to start another is pretty much impossible. So you can either pay contractors to sit around and wait, or you send them off to other projects that could use their attention. Another alternative is to get a crew that has accomplished only part of their stage and pull them off to a higher-priority job, returning them once that’s done, but I assume that there would would be additional inefficiencies in that method.
As state-funded highway construction seems to be a cost-driven, you get the most cost-efficient method: make sure that all crews are working at all times, but have most projects take longer than the sum of their stages.
On the contrary. . .
A lot of federal departments and agencies (and I’m sure state and local ones do as well) routinely include a warranty clause on a lot of their construction specs, including pavements, roofing, structures, grounds, etc.
You build a roof to our spec, and it starts leaking in three years, guess what–yer coming back to repair or replace it. That runway that you poured with a certain slump test? If it starts spalling after 6 months, yer coming back in, like it or not. . .
Tripler
It’s all in the execution and monitoring of the contract.
Just a speculative thing, but why not institute a massive civilian jobs program (I think they did this during the Depression) to DO stuff like get a highway done in a reasonable amount of time and so on?
Because it costs more money than having trained professionals doing it.
They did it in the Depression not so much to get things built faster but to stimulate the economy.
Questions about whether our economy could use similar stimulation are best left to another thread.