Slowing speed of road building

[GJHarney]

After a year, a 1 km dual carriageway link road being built near Preston is now around halfway done we are told by the council. If that is the case it will likely have taken around the same amount of time to build as the first UK motorway in the UK which happened to be the Preston by-pass (now park of the M6) and that was 13 km long.

This is not the first time in recent years I have been staggered by the slow pace of building for projects like these. So why is it that construction using far better heavy machinery than was available in the 1950s now takes it seems 10 times as long?

[UncleEbenezer]

Pure guess: could it be that they know 1950s-grade motorway wouldn't last a year under today's loads? Or something like that.

[UncleIan]

Because they went with the lowest cost provider and it turns out to be three blokes and a wheelbarrow?

[bungeejumper]

Elf and safety, innit? Those tea breaks won't take themselves, you know.

Our local council have just started work on adding some traffic lights to a roundabout. (It's not a particularly bad roundabout, as it happens, but I suppose they have some European cash to spare and they want to get it allocated before 29th March?) The works will also entail repainting the white lines. And it's going to take from February till October.

The traffic cones are already up, but I have yet to see anybody working on site. Although it would be unfair to say that they're not doing anything at all. On the first day, they put up a lot of expensive-looking plastic access barriers. On day two, as I passed by, one of the council contractors' vans had driven straight through the barrier and smashed it to pieces. Then they'd gone off for a tea break, leaving the van skewed across the wreckage.

"Need anuvver safety barrier, mate. Can't do any work now that we've destroyed this one."

What was it Flanders and Swann used to sing? "Oh, it all makes work for the working man to do..."

BJ

[EssDeeAitch]

After a year, a 1 km dual carriageway link road being built near Preston is now around halfway done we are told by the council. If that is the case it will likely have taken around the same amount of time to build as the first UK motorway in the UK which happened to be the Preston by-pass (now park of the M6) and that was 13 km long.

This is not the first time in recent years I have been staggered by the slow pace of building for projects like these. So why is it that construction using far better heavy machinery than was available in the 1950s now takes it seems 10 times as long?

It has taken Newcastle Council longer than that to not yet finish an upgrade of a 1 mile cycle lane on the Gosforth High Street.

[didds]

Our local council have just started work on adding some traffic lights to a roundabout. (It's not a particularly bad roundabout, as it happens, but I suppose they have some European cash to spare and they want to get it allocated before 29th March?) The works will also entail repainting the white lines. And it's going to take from February till October.

The traffic cones are already up, but I have yet to see anybody working on site. Although it would be unfair to say that they're not doing anything at all. On the first day, they put up a lot of expensive-looking plastic access barriers. On day two, as I passed by, one of the council contractors' vans had driven straight through the barrier and smashed it to pieces. Then they'd gone off for a tea break, leaving the van skewed across the wreckage.

BJ

LOL - I drove past that lot Saturday morniing!

didds

[madhatter]

A week or two back, a shop on the High Street need a gas main connection. As it involved a trench to the middle of the road, the road was blocked at that point.

It was scheduled to last from Monday to the following Monday, and on day one the barriers and signage were put in but no obvious other progress and nobody was still on the site when I saw it even though the weather was fine and there were still hours of daylight left. I got the impression that the work (for a trench did appear) only occurred in the morning and they all vanished by the mid-afternoon.

Being a main through route, having the road blocked was more than a bit of a nuisance. Cars could nip round the side streets to pass it but buses had to be rerouted and 11 bus stops closed.

“Dig hole and bugger off home” does seem to be pretty standard these days.

[bungeejumper]

Not for the first time (sorry), I am reminded of my student years in Berlin, where my crummy flat adjoined one of the main arterial roads of the city. During the spring they needed to replace about a mile of the road entirely - to dig away the tarmac, to remove the cobblestones and the disused wartime tramlines that lay buried under it all, and then to lay down a completely new compacted bed followed by fresh tarmac. Maybe they'd uncover a few unexploded bombs along the way?

To avoid disrupting the city traffic, it was decided to do the work solely at night. But to use a team of maybe 200 men, some of them armed only with picks and shovels. (Cobblestones don't really lift any other way.) Plus an armoured regiment of trucks and diggers, naturally.

It was horrifically noisy while it lasted! But it took them just two nights to complete the mile. When the rush hour traffic arrived on the Wednesday morning, the locals grumbled because they hadn't finished painting the white lines yet.

A logistical master stroke. With planners like that, it makes me wonder how Rommel managed to lose the Africa campaign.

BJ

[sg31]

A logistical master stroke. With planners like that, it makes me wonder how Rommel managed to lose the Africa campaign.

BJ

Because North Africa was a side show for the Germans. They had the Russian campaign taking most of their attention. If they had ever decided to concentrate on the desert campaign we would have lost.

[Slarti]

“Dig hole and bugger off home” does seem to be pretty standard these days.

Some months back we had major sewerage pipes replaced across the end of our road to cope with the 1300 new houses that are currently under construction, back upstream a ways.

I noticed that the job was done in various stages
1. Install warning signs
2. Deliver protective barriers
3. Deliver 4 way traffic lights
4. Set up 4 way traffic lights
2. Set up protective barriers
4. Turn 4 way traffic lights on
5. Dig trench
6. Do pipework
5. Refill trench and resurface road
2. Remove barriers
4. Turn off lights
3. Take lights away
2. Take barriers away
1. Remove warning signs

Each number above represents a different company, usually on a different day.
The actual digging and resurfacing was less than 2 days, the pipework 3 days but we had workmen parking outside in our road for over 2 weeks.

Slarti

[stewamax]

As a counterexample, IK Brunel famously designed a 1000-bed prefabricated hospital (complete with services such as sewerage and forced ventilation) in six days for shipment to Renkioi during the Crimean war. The prefab units were manufactured in stages, and the last of the stages was shipped five months later and when it arrived was installed and admitting patients within two months.

However, when the first stage was ready for shipment, the War Office had yet to find any bedding or even toilet paper ...