Not to mention that your roof doesn’t have a million cars traveling over it each day.
What’s a “reasonable” amount of time? It takes somethine like 30 days (IIRC) for concrete to cure to the point where it can take its design loads. You can’t change that no matter how many people you pay to stare at it.
Plus, you appear to have no idea how massive and complex some of these projects are. Take the Big Dig in Boston. How would a jobs program speed that along? What does the average person know about building a cable-stayed bridge or digging a tunnel?
Fast, Cheap, or Good. Pick your two. If you want every unemployed idiot digging ditches and pouring concrete, it’ll get done fast. It will probably be cheap. It will definitely be shit.
First someone says that untrained polish slaves built the first expressway in Germany that lasted 40 years, next, we are told that we cant have a federal works/jobs program to build/fix highways because they are “unskilled” labor.
Did the nazis use unskilled workers who knew nothing about bridges and concrete or did they just use common laborers?
Interesting thread- let me preface by stating I’m a bridge engineer for a state DOT and pavements are not my area. Bridge engineers often say that pavements are what connects bridges and not nearly as important.
Why did the German freeways last so long? According to an FHWA report such things as low traffic counts early in the life of the pavement, mild climate, no use of deicing salts. Personally, I think the 21 day water curing had a lot to do with it. A similar technique was done on the Davison freeway in Detroit years ago and that has held up very well too.
Why can’t we do it now? We can’t do much about the loads. We really can’t submerse every roadway in water for a month. Newer technology such as epoxy coated steel and composite reinforcement help a lot. The state DOTs and the FHWA are working very hard to get the best performance out of highway dollars. Really we are.
As to the OP, perhaps you were actually seeing crew maintenance work. Only a few trucks sounds like a small project, perhaps with state crews. If it was a major rehab project, you’d see many vehicles and a lot of workers. One thing some states are doing in renting lanes to the contractor. So if you want to take a lane of roadway for the summer, you pay for it. Get done faster, you make more money. There are also incentive and disincentive clauses to make things go on time. Obviously this is much more significant to interstates than for your local roads, so it might just be a case of the project in question in the OP being on a lesser road.
This is untrue. The Nazis had built the bulk of their highway system before WWII started. After that, while they did continue to add on, the project was never able to get the resources it needed. To my knowledge, they never used any slave labor. It would be too hard to control, they wanted high quality labor, and there was no small amount of national pride over the road system.
Another factor is compliance with local laws. Here (Jacksonville), our construction projects have to contend with two local ordinances. One restricts work at night - you have to get a permit. The other are very low noise limits - 65 Db day and 60 Db night, if I remember correctly. Background noise on the highway next to the project is around 70 Db. We try to do major construction at night, there is less traffic then. Our contracts also limit what can be done (esp. lane closures) during the daily rush hours. If we could completely keep traffic out of construction zones, we could get done much faster. When we are building a new corridor, it goes much faster then “under traffic.” By limiting work at rush hour, you reduce the effect on traffic, but it requires the contractor to have two set-ups and two shut-downs every 24 hours (start up after morning rush, shut down before evening rush, start up after evening rush, shut down before morning rush). If there are further restrictions - like no pile driving at night, that will extend the project even more. We have a major interchange rebuild underway, and there is a huge incentive for finishing by Jan. 2005 (we have the SuperBowl that year), but it doesn’t look like the contractor will be able to finish in time to claim it.
As was said earlier, the enforcement of the contract is very important. However, exacting late penalties is often of the time, the contractor will file claims that delays were out of their control - more rain than expected, delays in supplies, etc., etc. So the lawyers get involved, and the cases are settled years after the project is open to traffic.
One of my husband’s former classmates works for MnDOT (Minnesota Department of Transportation) and we discussed this at my hubby’s last high school reunion. He said the main reason it seems so inefficient is because it’s tied up in beaurocracy. Even if the labor/materials/equipment are all available on, say, June 1, the state legislature might not approve funding until July 1. And funding is given not for an entire project but in pieces which cannot be renegotiated even if a massive error is discovered. Every decision requires legislative action, and that’s the basic problem.
Another problem, he said, was that people working on various projects seldom talk to people on other projects. This summer, this is going to present a massive problem for the Twin Cities. Three major east-west arteries are all undergoing major construction at the same time. Hwy 62 is down to one lane for each direction through one of its most congested stretches. MnDOT is recommending people divert to I-494. But that has a lane narrowing at its most congested point due to a lane addition project. And in a few weeks (MnDOT is staying suspiciously silent on exactly when), that stretch will actually close entirely to allow the demolition of a bridge. That bridge also happens to be a very busy one with no easy alternates. Meanwhile, I-94 is down to two lanes for each direction through its busiest stretch (the connection between Minneapolis and St Paul) for bridge painting. It gets clogged even with four lanes open; with two lanes, it’s already a nightmare. And soon I-35W will be restricted to one lane just south of the I-494 interchange (which is already very slow due to the lane expansion) so a new bridge can be built. And they’ve received approval to begin work later this summer on removing and replacing the single most congested bridge in Bloomington – the Lyndale Avenue bridge. This crosses I-494 near the I-35W interchange, so it’ll just add to the headaches.
I have been trying to figure out alternate routes in my head to avoid all this mess, and I’m completely at a loss. All of the good alternates will be under construction at the same time, and one will actually be closed for a while. What ever were they thinking?
From Amborse Bierce’s Devils’s Dictionary:
“LOGIC, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. The basic of logic is the syllogism, consisting of a major and a minor premise and a conclusion – thus: Major Premise: Sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as quickly as one man. Minor Premise: One man can dig a posthole in sixty seconds;
therefore – Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a posthole in one second. This may be called the syllogism arithmetical, in which, by combining logic and mathematics, we obtain a double certainty and are twice blessed.”
Snork
Check my location. I’m here where those Nazi built autobahns still exist.
They still exist because the loads back then were extremely light. Very few private automobiles after the war, and not a whole heck of a lot of them before. Heavy loads went by rail. After the war, most cars were very small - many made the Beetle look like a large car. Add to that the fact that winters and summers here are very mild compared to most places in the US, and you wind up with highways that last for a long time.
Today’s heavier loads do terrible things to those highways. There was a stretch of Autobahn on the way from Frankfurt to Berlin that I drove down a couple of years after the Berlin wall came down. That was one of those old roads, and the load on it had jumped drastically after the change. That was a horrid experience. I drove in the left lane because the right was so rough I was afraid it would ruin the suspension on the car.
The new autobahns over here don’t hold up too well, either. The loads are more like what you see in the US, and the Germans are forever patching and widening the highways.
A lot of folks have hit the problem square on the head - scheduling of work load and deliveries of material cause most of the problems. Add to that the fact that German companies get paid a certain amount even when a construction site is shutdown for bad weather, and you get a really sucky situation. German contractors start a shit pot full of jobs just before winter closes in, and pull partial payments until springtime comes - leaving roads torn up and detours and shit in place. There was a village just up the road here that you had to go twenty miles out of the way to get to all winter a couple of years ago for this reason.
For even more fun, the Germans do not announce in advance that a road will be worked on. You start out for work one day, and discover that a road crew has put up a detour that makes you late for work and will create a traffic jam for the next six months - absolutely no warning on the road. They do announce it in the local papers, but I’d have to get something like twenty papers to cover my route to work and all of the alternatives.
Road work takes time, and it sucks. And just when they finally get finished, they rip it all up again because the stuff they just fixed has to handle more traffic than they planned for and now they’ve got to widen the roads.
Or the electric company, or the water company, or the sewer utility, or one or more of the phone companies, or the gas company, discover they need to rip up the road to do some upgrades (not repairing a leak or something, upgrading) on their buried utilities. Now, when they are asked about coordinating BEFORE the road work starts, why no, they don’t have anything they want to do there! :wally
More amusing than relevant, I think. I wasn’t discussing a single posthole, was I? You’re not trying to suggest that my premise–that highway work could get completed in about one-tenth the time it takes by using ten times the resources–is inherently flawed, are you? Even if you lose some percentage of the efficiency (and I’m starting to se how some loss might be inevitable), you’d still save a lot of the time that highways are closed down by increasing the man- (and equipment-) power.
No, I’m trying to suggest that resources frequently cannot be simply multiplied to accomplish a task in proportionately less time. Some of those resources exist in complex relationship to each other and can actually impede each other, and factors which limit one resource directly tend to limit other resources indirectly (and sometimes unpredictably).