The bridge is assembled over 2 nights at a motorway exit (so traffic can bypass it by driving off and immediately back on to the road). During night 1 the two end ramps are assembled and attached together to make a short bridge. During night 2 the ramps are driven apart, the central section is built to reach the full length and the entire structure is driven to the final location.
The entire length is 236 meters long providing a working length of 100 meters underneath. The assembled bridge can flex slightly at the joins between sections, and has a turning radius of 2 kilometers.
The whole Marti youtube channel is a marvel for engineering geeks like me. If you have the occasion, you should take a look (talks about tunneling, big machines, etc)
They use a tunnel boring machine to bore a tunnel with a 45° slope.
They do go into the mechanics of how they make this insanely massive machine drive up a grade that steep, and how they ensure it doesn't slide backward.
I was glued to the screen more than with most movies.
If you like channels like Practical Engineering, you will enjoy this.
The boring company isn't move fast and break things. They literally just bought a drill and use it like any other construction company. There's no innovation at all.
They started that way, just buying a drill, but are now trying to innovate and build their own one. They are just starting using Prufrock-3. The Prufrocks are machines the Boring company have made themselves. They say "Prufrock's medium-term goal is to exceed 1/10 of human walking speed, which is 7 miles per day." which is way faster than anyone else. The Swiss machine in the video did 400m in 4 months. They are also experimenting with evacuated tunnels (https://youtu.be/nV07jqwCy0A?t=879) which may not go anywhere but is at least an attempt at innovation.
"7 miles per day" is all talk and no proof it can actually be done. The Swiss dig a lot of holes from easy to very complex terrain. If there was an easy way go that much faster they would.
There was a derailment of a cargo train the the Gotthard base tunnel last year [1]. It caused a huge amount of damage and one tunnel will be close until September this year. They need to replace 7km of track. If there way anyone to do this correctly faster they would as it is costing millions not having this route open. Concrete needs time to cure etc. some things you can't just make faster because someone said so.
It’s incredible how defensive people get around others’ ambitious goals.
Every Elon company sets super high goal targets. They are often completely unrealistic with current technology but it inspires certain types of people to innovate and it works quite well.
> The Swiss dig a lot of holes from easy to very complex terrain. If there was an easy way go that much faster they would.
Nobody said anything about “easy”. Also, The argument of “the established players don’t work on X so X isn’t possible” doesn’t work.
If the Swiss are happy with their industry the industry isn’t going to risk really capital intense experimentation to do better. See: Innovator’s dilemma
> The Swiss machine in the
> video did 400m in 4 months.
No, a lot of the time the machine was stationary because the needed to manually reinforce what they were about to drill through, so the machine wouldn't get trapped and buried in gravel. Wouldn't Prufrock-3 be similarly slowed down!
In addition to that I assume that the 7 miles a day claim assumes 24/7 drilling, whereas I wouldn't be surprised if the swiss were doing 8/5 drilling.
Nobody said “break things”. Making one specific thing reliably, quickly and cheap is a completely different approach to the “move fast and break things” approach.
Fast. Fast always wins. Trying something, regardless of outcome teaches something about the world. The more trials, the more you roll the dice, the more you learn.
I really hate being wrong, but it is much better to be wrong a lot, and quickly understand why. The alternative is to try nothing. It’s kinda sad.
Fast wins for something like mobile apps but not infrastructure where safety matters and you can’t just shrug off liability. The Boring Company is a great example: fast to market themselves but almost all of their projects have fallen through.
Which nascent technologies have became common, dominant by innovators unilaterally adhering to the precautionary principle?
The cliché "Worse is better" describes this (turrible) phenomenon. (The flip side being "safety regulations are written in blood.")
I really wish this wasn't the world we live in. I want to live in a world with consequences (and justice). I've been railing against it my whole career. And judging from my meager savings, failing in my efforts.
Iteration always wins. There may be other constraining factors, but if you can violate those to iterate more (i.e. cheat), you’ll beat your competitors who honor those constraints.
This has nothing to do with the success or failure of any given company.
You seem to have misunderstood what I’m saying. Iteration is how you learn. Learning through iteration, which is known under various names like Wright’s law or more generally experience curve effects [1], goes hand in hand with economies of scale in driving down costs.
Yes, iteration requires you to survive. Not sure how that’s relevant. Cutting corners also isn’t necessarily a bad thing - you’re focusing on the extreme example where people die. Cutting corners can also be a careful evaluation of what processes are and aren’t relevant to a given situation but that becomes trickier when it’s enshrined in law. Imagine if guidelines from the 80s about how to write software were enshrined in law.
Regulations more often than not do ignore the flip side in terms of the cost of compliance because it’s difficult to show the counter factual universe in which a regulation may save 10% more lives (or maybe even 0% more lives) but drove up costs by 100x.
> A number of these phenomena have been bundled under the name "Software Engineering". As economics is known as "The Miserable Science", software engineering should be known as "The Doomed Discipline", doomed because it cannot even approach its goal since its goal is self-contradictory. Software engineering, of course, presents itself as another worthy cause, but that is eyewash: if you carefully read its literature and analyse what its devotees actually do, you will discover that software engineering has accepted as its charter "How to program if you cannot.".
It does depend on the domain though. Sometimes moving slowly and carefully can result in a faster successful outcome than throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks.
> The more trials, the more you roll the dice, the more you learn.
If you have infinite dice rolls this is obviously true. If every dice roll costs you something or indeed everything... heh. Maybe don't just roll it to see what happens?
Yes, sure fast wins when building a bridge. Or a tunnel. Which then collapses. Safe wins, this is not Facebook where people share some holiday pictures.
"but it is much better to be wrong a lot"
I disagree, "Oh the bridge collapesed, I was wrong! But this is much better than being right" - Nope.
... which has its own reasons, namely regulations (you know, every time there was a new disaster they added another one) or maybe some corruption. You don't see bridges falling in US regularly killing tons of folks, do you.
I am not saying its ideal and there is no room for improvement, nothing in real world is, but please consider other, 'fast' scenarios for long term (100+ years) existence when not only many lives are at stake.
> You don't see bridges falling in US regularly killing tons of folks, do you.
Falling yes. Killing is hit-or miss. I would be surprised if the reasons bridges are failing due to lack of maintenance is entirely unrelated to the cost of building.
There are many ways things could be better, and many ways things could be worse.
Attacking something only because it's cheaper and faster seems silly.
Please share a single recent example from US, I am only aware of one relatively recent catastrophic case from northern Italy, where maintenance was subpar.
Cheaper reflects many things, overall quality testing, attention to detail, how much effort went into design etc. Its not a silver bullet but oh boy does it always show on result, without exception.
I was more impressed by the OP seemingly from Swiss public body. The Marti one in GP is exactly the sort of sales demo type video I'd expect 'for a contracting company', though with lashings of high speed chase or shooting narrated video (you know, the 40% ads, 50% rehashing what we've seen or telling us what's to come, 10% content variety) for some reason.
Because there are American (or Canadian, British, etc) companies that do what's necessary for American Civil Engineering.
When it is worth it, American public works entities do reach out to German (and other national) companies. As to issues like this specifically? Because the US generally has wider freeways/highways, so is less impacted by single/double lane shutdowns for surfacing. In addition, many states have opted for less long-lasting quick pack asphalt for surface streets which can be resurfaced in place and ready to drive on again in a few hours.
I know it's Internet rhetoric to assume America and it's government are incompetent, but the Civil Corps of Engineers, CalTrans, etc are actually pretty good at their jobs. The biggest horror stories are jobs given to private entities that go overbudget and overtime.
One factor you’ll see in many areas of government is the second order cost of eliminating civil service positions. It’s most common to talk about how contractors usually end up costing more and being less efficient due to additional overhead and conflicts of interest, but there’s a deeper problem that the government doesn’t have a staff of people with the knowledge and experience to select and manage contractors. That’s how you end up in situations where none of the alternatives are better than eating the cost of a bad plan or accepting a lower project lifetime, and because it’s a managerial failure the blame is often spread between three or more organizations and often has no effective accountability.
Well, for the California example, CalTrans is the govt. They're well staffed and don't (generally, it may occur occasionally) rely on contractors for their work. I believe the same goes for CDOT and other agencies, though many of them are more willing to contract out as they don't necessarily prioritize roadwork like Californians do (for obvious reasons).
Generally, it's particularly rare (at least in the Western "blue" States) to rely on mostly or, especially, exclusively private public works programs.
Wait so all this lets them pave a 100 meters a week (assemble bridge on one weekend, pave on Monday, then disassemble the bridge the next weekend after the asphalt has dried)? That seems horribly slow and expensive.
100m at 1 lane is around 430SY. That's probably 2hrs of milling and an hour of tacking and paving, with maybe another hour or so for incidentals. So you may only get half a workday of production. For time consuming repairs, like full-depth replacement, the setup time cost may not be significant.
Keep in mind, though, you don't lose a lane of traffic. There is no need to truck in jersey barriers. You don't have to build an entire temporary detour road. You don't pay a consultant $200/hr to design a traffic control plan.
I think the real value is safety. The crew is shielded by the bridge and you have complete grade separation from traffic. That's a lot better than an orange barrel being the only thing between you and a minivan.
oh this is cool.
I did think for a 2 day setup and 1/2 day takedown it wasn't a huge efficiency saving but it is if you move it down the road at the same time.
As the comment above mentions, safety is a huge factor too.
During the night, there will be 1 lane open in each direction (one on the side of the bridge, and one on the opposite carriageway), so the bridge can be moved.
I guess it's theoretically possible to engineer a bridge that can move with traffic on it.
But this bridge is engineered with solid feet for taking traffic loads. The wheels are only extended for movement and wouldn't be able to take the load of traffic.
Having to stop traffic, and then redirect it into the one emergency lane, every time 100m is finished in order to advance seems like a huge disadvantage.
If the road is anywhere close to max capacity this will cause traffic jams either way.
But usually roads aren't even close to max capacity at night, when the shifting happens – which, I imagine, is much less stressful and time-critical than doing the whole resurfacing in a single night.
It would be awesome if the the entire bridge could slowly move as one while traffic keeps flowing over it. That would require far more and far bulkier wheels than the current ones designed to carry only one support segment. That will have to remain the stuff of fantasies...
The bridge could temporarily lift just the 2 ends and traffic could continue slowly under the bridge while the bridge moves ahead. However, it needs to also raise its height for trucks to pass under or alternatively, trucks could be temporarily suspended/rerouted from the road while the bridge moves.
Sure, but that can happen at night with minimal disruption to traffic as it takes only the time to move it, not the time to disassemble, move, and re-assemble.
Possibly, but unlikely IMHO - it looks like the bridge deploys rigid hydraulic outriggers when stationary, and changes to flexible pneumatic tyres when moving.
If the bridge was supported by flexible rubber tyres while heavy trucks were driving over the top of it, it'd probably wobble enough to make everyone involved uncomfortable.
I don’t think ragebol meant that the bridge rolls forward with traffic on it. Just that once a 100m long stretch is finished they can roll the bridge 100m forward with the traffic re-routed or suspended during the repositiong. If they time it right the resurfacing can be done with minimal disruption in the dead of night.
Half right. At night, they direct all traffic onto the shoulder / emergency lane and roll the bridge forward 100m with no traffic going over it at the time. By day, the bridge is stationary, traffic goes over it, and work goes on underneath.
> To me it feels like 90% of road works I pass actually has nobody there working at all. Some go on for years it seems.
This is for simple road resurfacing, which is usually done in a day or two anyway.
There are a lot of factors as to why road construction takes a long time, but the biggest reason is safety. They aren't completely closing the road in most cases so while a large section might be coned off, they are moving the worker protection (vehicle barriers) around from section to section.
Lots of specialized expensive equipment is involved where you might be waiting a week just for the thing you need to become available. Same with specialized workers and sub-contractors. Add in time you might just need to wait for concrete to harden to the point its safe to move a big piece of equipment onto it for the next phase.
Construction is a scheduling nightmare. You can throw money at the problem, but it is in the end tax dollars and rarely is there a good reason.
People say this a lot, but I really don't think it's a very satisfying explanation for having miles of one lane of a highway barricaded for weeks or months without any workers or equipment in sight, ever.
Everyone can name a stretch of highway they've seen treated this way, and this explanation just doesn't cover it.
This is a form of sampling bias. The quick projects are only there briefly, so you're less likely to see them. Everyone sees a slow project that has some scheduling disaster occur, like a strike or a supply shortage or a government failure of some kind.
You don't know just from driving by whether 99.9% of projects are quick and efficient.
Or they might live in a place with an enriched and proliferate construction mafia, such as Quebec, and so having multiple roadway construction projects ongoing with no actual work done for months would actually be a frequent, intentional occurrence.
> without any workers or equipment in sight, ever. [...] Everyone can name a stretch of highway they've seen treated this way
I think there's an inherent bias here. Each individual is not seeing that section of road 24/7. At most they see it for a few minutes (or perhaps a little longer, if traffic slows enough), maybe once or at most a few times per day. That's a very small fraction of the day, and work could be occurring during other parts of the day, possibly even at night. Safety might require that they do the work when there are few cars driving by, but the nature of the work might be such that they can't unblock the lanes during the day.
I get that this isn't satisfying, but often reality isn't. And I have no doubt that there are plenty of mismanaged projects around the world where there are lots of delays, and long stretches of time when nothing is getting done. But I think it's incorrect to believe that nothing is getting done just because a few people you know drive by the area a few times a day and don't see anyone working.
Very common on US freeways for work to be performed at night even though it's barricaded during the day. The barricades are to keep traffic off of work in progress, actual work may require additional lane closures, traffic disruptions as trucks enter and exit, and safety scales with traffic volumes. Keep in mind, for example, that the permanent closure area is not typically large enough to stage equipment. That means that equipment and supplies need to be moved in and out of a laydown yard during work, which is very dangerous during normal traffic volume.
It also tends to be the case that price is reduced by scheduling work across multiple contractors with independent scheduling... so the cost savings come at the expense of idle periods while waiting for the next contractor to be available. Not a totally unaddressable problem but ultimately fast and cheap are, as usual, opposing requirements. Funding politics can also play a role here, very common that larger projects don't have all of their funding available at once, so they may sit idle while waiting for the next set of funds.
> People say this a lot, but I really don't think it's a very satisfying explanation for having miles of one lane of a highway barricaded for weeks or months without any workers or equipment in sight, ever.
The problem is that both the workers and the equipment are short in supply.
The cause of that is the lack of continuity in politics. Construction machines and staff training can easily reach dozens of millions of euros in cost - particularly when it's rail related. It would be financial suicide for any company outside of extremely large conglomerates to take on that risk without politics providing the guarantee of at least 20 years worth of projects to recoup that investment. Instead, the US is down to "we can barely plan for the next fiscal year" timeframe, and Europe to "we can barely plan 5 years until the next EU fiscal cycle, add national election cycles and you're down to 1-2 years as well". On top of that come government accounting clusterfucks - basically, the norm is that it is very difficult to transfer budgets from one year to the next, and when you don't use all your budget for whatever reason, next year's budget will be cut back.
If this is the case then move the cones barrels where you haven’t done any work yet. In the states you often see miles cordoned off by barrels with no work has been done yet, well beyond where any person would say there is a safety issue.
I once heard an unsubstantiated claim that federal funding was dependent upon length of the road work. Over-provisioning blocker barrels was a loophole to extend the distance and receive more funding.
> it feels like 90% of road works I pass actually has nobody there working at all. Some go on for years it seems.
That's because the company that wins the tender knows they're competing on the lowest price, and nobody really cares for time to completion. So they're keeping the construction site as a fallback for other construction sites, that are more important to them and have a higher price tag.
It's the equivalent to preemptive pricing for VMs.
Exactly! And it doesn't even have to be a fallback. The same company could have won (or "won" if you know what I mean) many/majority of those tenders and are intentionally spread thin. Because once you win it, you leave a token crew there, and move to win another one, leave token crew again and again. So they're just doing everything all at once very slowly while being paid a lot.
Also this doesn't even have to be a public works type of job. They do this kind of stuff for private works like house construction. 30 people show up and start working, and after couple of days you have 2 guys working for weeks while others are somewhere else.
I was very surprised when I saw repaving of couple of street intersections in Chicago. Those guys did it like they were on a competition. Really fast and really nice. They were done in couple of days. I couldn't believe it. In my part of the world, the same job would take months, and I'm not even kidding.
Many of the cases that I know of where a performance bonus existed (like $million for every day the estimate is beaten) they finished ahead of schedule and under budget.
Ahh and I thought the forever-construction sites were a Swiss thing. Every 20 km or so you'd have 1-2 km of road construction signage where nothing happens for a couple of years. At some point it just disappears, to come up again a few km down the road. Nobody here to explain us the phenomenon?
I had an eccentric Maths teacher at school who used to stare out of the window and make odd claims. One was that he was running a roadworks business using telekinetic powers, and all the people in hi-vis jackets were merely scarecrows.
One of the largest time components can be due to soil compaction. This period can look like no work is being done, but is a vital step. That's not to say that sometimes no work is being done because of scheduling, equipment, funds, or any number of other reasons.
Isn't some of that due to earth settling that you can't really speed up? I remember a fun fact from many years ago where I was growing up. They built a new interstate bridge/overpass, and it wasn't too long after that they noticed it starting to sink. Well it turns out they had drilled sample cores down to like 100 feet, and had good results, but after the sinking, they drilled new cores, and there was a layer of sandstone or something at like 105 feet. I don't really remember how it all got sorted out, but it was under construction for a long time.
I wonder (and maybe someone here will know) whether that means they were foolishly cutting corners and should have sampled further than 100ft down, or if what they did was considered best practise and they were just unlucky to find themselves in a freak situation?
Likely the second - they usually base drilling depth on the known area and a wide margin, so everyone probably thought 75 feet was fine, do a hundred to be safe.
And in Japan it seems that every time you drive somewhere after 10pm there are roadworks everywhere (on the non-toll roads). Very pretty with kaleidoscopic lights but it takes just as long late at night to move around as earlier on.
> Also, nice to see good old
> "dude with shovel" in there,
> a tool that would have looked
> the same back in the 19th
> century.
The guy using a flat broom at around 1:12 in the video has him beat.
While the I was surprised at how recently the flat broom was invented (the very tail end of the 18th century), the job he's doing with a broom goes back to antiquity.
>Also, nice to see good old "dude with shovel" in there, a tool that would have looked the same back in the 19th century.
I grew up occasionally using tools of the shovel-variety which sometimes were from the 19th century, and when not, not far off.
Every time I drive through particularly ornery construction I start to fantasize about writing software to optimize the critical path and driver disruption.
I also am left wondering having seen several iterations of "improvement" projects that were followed a number of years later on the same stretch of road with another project... if anybody analyzes the whole effect of the project and if the designed improvement made up for the considerable interruption executing it caused. Like on a "net-positive" basis, would folks have been better off if nothing at all was done and the project just skipped.
Where I live it goes crazy with road works when it's coming to the end of the year with the council trying to spend the unused budget rather than lose it.
The hourly wages in Switzerland are at least 2x those in Japan, and Swiss people generally don't like working outside normal working hours, so getting 10x workers at night is not very feasible.
> getting 10x workers at night is not very feasible.
You can get as many workers as you need, for a price.
For example, got a 2 day window at Christmas to perform a rail upgrade? And overrunning on time costs thousands of pounds per minute? Just show up with a large workforce and lots of spare parts and equipment.
The downside is you end up paying for things like having a couple of diesel mechanics on site just in case a backhoe breaks down. Maybe none of your backhoes broke down, and you paid for 2 guys times 48 hours times 3x their normal hourly rate, just to sit in their truck.
Of course, overnight work does tend to get noise complaints from locals - no amount of workers will solve that!
The same breakdowns happen with slow roadworks. It’s just that the cost of taking 3 months longer isn’t factored in. Me sitting in a jam is an externalised cost that they don’t care about.
In my Southern state they prefer to work at night because of how hot it is during the day. Something that could reasonably be called 'Summer' runs from about March to September here. More in some years. It was in the 70s New Years Day here this year.
I love to see infrastructure jobs like this that don't interfere with people's daily lives. A similar feeling when I watch the Japanese build a subway in just 3 hours: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BYW4YYqG5A
Meanwhile, just down the road from me, we've had a major bridge closed since April of last year, and is due to reopen October 2024....
Videos like this should be a lesson to Civic planners everywhere.
this particular change took 3 hours. but generally speaking there were years of planning and other construction works that made a 3 hour switch even possible.
Japanese rail projects aren't particularly fast. The subway line that was connected in this 3 hour switch started construction in 2001, finished in 2008, and the connection made in the video was completed in 2013. https://ja-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/%E6%9D%B1%E4%...
One other thing that makes the 3 hour window possible is the sheer amount of manpower they throw at the problem during these three hours. the US does not have a project construction industry built around swarming, but rather maintaining a lower cost small crew at all times. One reason why there is so much construction in Japan is because the government has relied on fiscal stimulus to the point where it now has the highest debt-to-GDP in the world at a rate of 263%.
They often work under a different set of political or administrative constraints that make these things impossible to execute. Seeing it done on one stretch of road is entirely different than allocating 100 miles worth of repaving budget to a 5 mile stretch to avoid inconvenience. That's a tough sell.
And they do do things when it’s warranted, like the bridge replacements where they build a whole new bridge next to the existing one and swap it overnight.
When they first installed this contraption next to us, they messed up the incline. It was too steep so one of longer trailer trucks promptly got stuck on it ultimately doing just that - stopping all traffic on the highway. It was glorious.
Also, the speed limit on these bypasses is 60 km/h, so they are halving the bandwidth and create massive congestions during peak hours. Probably the reason they stopped using them recently and just close the highway for few hours at night instead.
Peak bandwidth of roads happens at surprisingly low speeds, you wanna maximise bandwidth set the speed limit to about 20km/h [1]. Anything higher and road capacity starts reducing.
So reducing the speed limit down to 60/h actually increases the capacity of the road, and reduces the likelihood of rolling traffic jams occurring or persisting.
This is a question I have wondered all the time (predominantly while stuck in traffic). Frequently wondered if, during rush hour, posted speed limits should be dropped by X to actually increased throughput.
Having not yet read the paper, I am curious if this was factoring in just typical average speed or if lower speeds are also going to have fewer/less severe accidents (accidents having an outsized impact on my road delays).
Bandwidth doesn't vary much with speed (since people tend to maintain the same 2 second gap from the car in front of them), except at low speeds where the nonzero size of each car becomes significant.
Anecdotally, it seems like I see more wild driving when posted speeds are higher. People are more aggressive in higher speed zones, which inevitably leads to more crashes. Severe accidents being one of those things which can dramatically hurt traffic throughput.
In the UK, well England more than the rest of the UK, we have a system for reducing disruption on the roads during maintenance. We just let it go decades without any resurfacing.
Great technique. Thankfully every vehicle model seems to increase in size, durability, and suspension capability to mitigate any negative side effects.
This made me laugh, given my horrendous bike journey today on roads filled with holes in London.
I'm pretty sure most of the damage are from construction company lorries. I wonder why the gov doesn't just tax them for their usage/destruction of public roads, and fund repairs with that?
You should see how hard every trucker and good ol' boy here in the USA whines and moans about weight limits and blames BIG GUMMINT for ruining their day. The fact that they are doing exponentially more damage to the pavement, wearing it out much faster doesn't occur to them.
> why the gov doesn't just tax them for their usage/destruction of public roads
Because the lorry owners (construction and transportation co.) would bitch and fight tooth and nail against that, rise the transport costs and... everyone would claim the roads aren't repaired anyway.
Source: living in a country what did exactly that. Oh, they bitched hard.
We try to avoid Boston traffic by driving at night and then we run into... night construction! There's basically no time when traffic is reasonable around Boston. I'm pretty certain if they gave this equipment to the Mass DOT they'd figure out how to modify it to negate any benefit. /rant
I agree that cat centric life is awful. However "you are traffic" is not the whole picture, not all traffic is created equal. Some people are just naturally adept at making traffic.
Why do Americans think "traffic" means congestion? Traffic is the people on the road. You can say things like "let me check the traffic" or "the traffic is really bad", but if you use the road you are traffic. It's nothing to do with congestion, if you use the road you are traffic. It's this kind of subtle language mistake that reveals a whole country full of main characters: I'm the one travelling, everyone else is just there for my inconvenience.
Correct. That's the biggest downside of car infrastructure, we are bound(ed?) by the lowest common denominator. Once a slow car is blocking the way we just contribute to that same traffic.
It's awful for most. If a person lives long enough, they will likely lose the ability to drive. A lack of walkable infrastructure basically means social death at that point. How many people struggle with the decision to try to take the keys away from their parents?
Also, cars create mobility issues by injuring people.
Good pedestrian and transit infrastructure is barrier-free. If you can't cross the street and board a train in a wheelchair, the lack of pedestrian infrastructure is exactly the problem.
The problem isn't barriers to being a pedestrian. It's alternate forms of transit not existing. My town barely has bus service. The nearest stop is over a mile away, and it has a frequency, in theory, of hourly. I live in town. The bus route sorta serves the historically poor section of town and that's about it. Having a car is not optional. We don't have a functional long distance rail network, never mind light rail or subways.
It sounds like your town does have a serious deficiency, but that deficiency is not a shortage of car infrastructure. It seems like it needs much more transit.
The money for transit needs to come from land values (capturing the increase to land values that the transit creates). Ticket revenue can never fund a transit system.
This is how train networks the world over were built, with train companies buying up land and then developing or leasing it out after their railways made it valuable. It's how successful transit companies operate in Asia and remain profitable, building shopping malls and hotels on and around their stations.
It doesn't require population density (that comes after the development), it doesn't require government support (although it helps, especially if the government is subsidizing roads), but it does require investment and long-term planning.
People do not pay taxes anywhere near the level needed to maintain the existing roads, much less expand them. They also do not pay enough for the health costs their driving inflicts on the people whose neighborhoods they drive through, nor the cost of the climate change we’re all living through. Similarly, while most countries have free movement that does not guarantee availability of space to put those extra lanes - your freedom to drive ends where other people’s property begins.
Governments can buy property. There are lots of things that can be cut by government to get more roads - all that public assistance that goes to a small portion of people can be re-examined and reapportioned to help all people via roads rather than a large portion of them who are leeches.
Climate change isn’t some doomsday. Relax about it, I promise you that you and billions of others will be fine. Many of us are tired of living our lives for the Doomsday Climate Cult.
Imagine not building something because there will be more demand. I don’t care if they never scale to 100% demand, every additional mile of lane helps.
I almost can't believe an adult individual in 2024 has this opinion.
decades of peer reviewed, real world verifiable evidence against your recommendation exists, and every single municipality responsible for maintaining roads the world over now plans for this actuality.
Can yu provide a single example of expanding lanes on a public thoroughfare reduced congestion? SEE: LA, Baltimore, etc.
Seems to me that all this capacity being added hasn't reduced traffic to any meaningful degree. It may be time to try reducing the cars on the road by providing alternative means of getting around instead.
Every mile means more people can decide to live further away from their workplace, or that they can physically attend meetings further away more easily rather than do a video call. It means more people go by car rather than by train or bus. It causes more traffic and more pollution, it doesn't reduce it.
Same thing in California, but working at night is actually better for the workers when it comes to sun and breathing in exhaust fumes. This might be economical for what amounts to a two lane road, but we have freeways with 22 lanes (I5).
Extremely cool video. Very cool technique as well. Two questions.
First, I'm guessing the cardboard boxes they filled with road material are for testing / QA of the blend?
Second, the "bridge" structure that allows traffic to keep flowing is very cool, but I'm assuming you have to stop traffic to get it into place to begin with. Seems unlikely they are moving that structure while traffic drives over it. Of course placing that structure should take much less time than the resurfacing process, but how much time? Minutes? Hours?
It's probably overnight to set it in position, but it looks like it has wheels so they can probably move it down the road in an overnight hour or so.
It's basically a one-time capital cost for the "mobile bridge" and then they can use it repeatedly; not sure it really ends up being better overall than the usual American "divide and conquer" method used, where they do a lane at a time and divert traffic around. The denser the area the more valuable it'll be, I presume.
Beyond the bridge, the thing that has me stunned here is the precision and cleanliness of the job site. Being from the north east of USA, I am used to seeing road construction sites in permanent disarray - materials everywhere, rough interfaces between work site and untouched road, filthy machines, trucks, uniforms, and tool, etc. Is this just pristine because it's for a promo video or is this the norm in some places?
As a someone born and raised in the Northeast now living in Switzerland I can confirm that the cleanliness, orderliness and array of machinery is indeed typical in Switzerland :D But don’t let this bridge promo fool you, you’re just as likely to deal with roads closed to construction as anywhere else… the cost of well functioning infrastructure is that they always seem to be working on it!
Probably a lot different when you are working under a bridge with cars whizzing about your head. There is not a lot of margin for error or an abundance of space to leave extra equipment.
Geez, I hate having to watch Swiss infrastructure projects. Living in Zurich completely destroyed any residual respect for the way we build in America. Aside from this clever bridge, note how many and how extreme the differences are between what you see in this video and what you would witness watching an American repaving crew. They have a sufficient amount of labor on the job, compared to the 3 guys you would see on an American job. They all have uniform PPE, instead of jeans and t-shirts. Their equipment is clean and looks like it probably works. Site dumpers are appropriately scaled for the job. Bigger dump trucks are normal cabover trucks instead of insane brodozers. They actually use an sufficient quantity of binder, instead of skimping on it because American supervisors can't tell the difference. So many differences in culture.
Does denim not satisfy PPE requirements for most normal job sites? What non-specialized material is better than denim at the requirements you explained?
I've seen this in Texas, notably on I-35 through Austin and on I-10 east out near the state line. In sequence, single-file, all the machines needed to do the job, from milling the surface at the front to laying down the new blacktop, rolling it, and IIRC painting it. Just creeping up the highway. Pilot vehicles at the front and back to close/open the lane.
Texas definitely throws money at the problem. Although lately they're optimizing their spend for larger checks to fewer contractors on bigger roads. Simplifies all the kickbacks I'm sure.
It's for quality assurance. You take samples of asphalt (in this case), concrete, etc. during construction and they get shipped off for analysis. I don't know what they do with the asphalt, but for concrete they do slump tests of the wet concrete and crush tests of cured samples. Probably other tests too.
I'm guessing it's pretty rare for the results to come back as "tear it all out and start over", but... you'd sure want to know if that were the case!
Does anyone know how the full width of the carriageway gets surfaced in this setup? Perhaps lane closures on the left/right side (sequentially) after the centre portion has been resurfaced?
The bridge itself is wide enough to resurface one lane. But its wheels can move in any direction. So instead of driving forward to do the next section you can also drive three meters to the left or right to do another lane instead.
In general the entire bridge is as maneuverable as a 230m structure can be. The individual segments are designed to articulate. So once it's set up you can move it around to any other patch of road surface in the area.
What're incentives for state to care about traffic? In my city they'd close road, do nothing for a month, then quickly patch in a few days and open road. They don't care about traffic jams and badly patched road requires repair every few years, which is a good thing for repair company, they always got a lot of work.
Theoretically I understand that bad traffic results in bad economy and less taxes, but in reality those things are so far away from each other to not make any influence.
The government decided to dig a third tunnel in one case because they calculated the economic damage would be greater if they had to close one tunnel for several years than digging the 3rd. Also this 3rd tunnel will not be used after construction other than for emergency evacuation. The 3rd tunnel was only approved under condition that capacity will not be increased.
Either your local officials are incompetent, or the problems at hand are much more complicated than you're giving them credit for.
When it comes to locals, they are much more apt to be voted out by not repairing potholes, then state/national levels where people tend to vote on party lines.
But, back to your road issues, I'm guessing you missed the part where some underlying infrastructure has gone bad, water and sewer pipes the most common culprits were fixed. If traffic were allowed to drive over the problematic pipes it would have made the issue much worse much faster leading to the entire street getting dug up.
I bet they cannot set up that bridge without "stopping traffic completely". It needs to be built or at least moved to the target spot, during that time, traffic needs to be stopped.
From a network engineer standpoint this sounds like false advertisement ;-)
("Your server can be moved to another rack non-disruptively. We just need to disconnect your network cable and connect it to another switch.")
It's like every redundancy type system I have seen, either for data storage, or network traffic, or applications. Yes, it does prevent a thing or helps to protect from it, very true from that point of view.
Except now whatever is orchestrating that redundancy is a new point of some seriously messed up failure (or even just management, testing, and setup) that you never had before ;)
Very cool. Reminds me of this video I saw recently about the new subway being dug in Vancouver. There they build a temporary road surface above the underground work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4YFFtTEUQc&t=380s (I linked to the most relevant part, but the coolest part of this video is probably the machine that bores and reinforces the tunnel in one pass.)
> Speed bumps (also called traffic thresholds, speed breakers or sleeping policemen) are a class of traffic calming devices that use vertical deflection to slow motor-vehicle traffic in order to improve safety conditions
1. Potholes are also being phased out in many locations, but apparently not on El Camino.
2. Horizontal deflection and blocking access (usually requiring more distance to be covered) both increase maintenance on vehicles; by my count, three out of four categories of traffic calming increase maintenance on vehicles --- it's clearly an allowed part of the design. Going back several comments, blocking access often makes cycling much worse too. As can narrowing, depending on how its done.
The vast majority of measures on the list I linked do not increase maintenance at all, and certainly don't cause a "lot more in vehicle maintenance". Some, like a roundabout, may cause driver to spend less in maintenance vs. alternative intersection designs.
How do you want to count? By category, I see 3 out of 4 categories that increase vehicle maintenance costs; some more than others.
By individual items: there's 6 items in narrowing, which I think is reasonable to say don't increase maintenance. There's 8 vertical deflections, which are all increasing. There's three in horizontal deflection, I'll give you roundabouts (I've argued enough about those elsewhere), so that's 2 more increasing and 1 not. For blocking, there's four, all of which are likely to increase travel distance.
So 6 + 1 = 7 vs 8 + 2 + 4 = 14. 7 out of 21 is the vast majority?
Pot holes clearly fit under vertical and horizontal deflection. Possibly block or restrict access. Deferred maintenance could be a general category of traffic calming.
Gentle vertical and horizontal deflections do not put undue wear on a car. This is why it is okay for roads to have things like turns. When cars go around roundabouts, through residential chicanes, or over properly designed speed humps at reasonable speeds, it does not put any more wear on a car than normal road features.
Speed bumps are relatively gradual changes in height relative to pot holes. A properly built speed bump driven over at an appropriate speed doesn't "shock" your vehicle.
Translated from one of the newest comments under the video:
"Thank you for the courage of the engineers and responsible authority not to give up despite the (failed) first attempt and to dare a second improved attempt."
In addition to the technical performance, there is an equally remarkable social performance.
The city planners here in Auburn should probably watch this.
They have a horrible habit of performing this kind of work during the worst possible times.
All of the college students will be gone for the summer and things will be nice and quiet. Then the students return and football season begins. Town becomes a mess. Then the City of Auburn start resurfacing roads or adding medians or additional lanes.
It's happened every year for the past 14 years that I've been a resident. It never fails. They always wait until school starts back before they begin any repairs.
I remember something like this in Popular Mechanics magazine (or similar) back in the 70's or perhaps even earlier. It was one of their awesome "artist's concept" piece that depicted more of a proposal, or what we might call a pipe dream, ha ha.
I wish I could find the depiction — it was a ramp with cars passing over just like that (a lot shorter however) that would drive very slowly along, paving as it went.
It is such a flat road and relatively straight. There are lots, but ultimately limited use cases, compared to where busy roads go out there in the real world.
I also think every one of those workers under that bridge should be wearing some type of respiratory filter for their long term health.
I'd love to see one of these on each end of the arterial 4-lane streets of Chicago. When spring hits, fire them up and go from one end to the other in either direction. Potholes become a thing of the past.
We're already used to overhead infrastructure with the L all over the city.
Amazing! Going further, I was recently wondering why we don’t just build two-layer (or higher) freeways in areas that have heavy congestion. “Express” lanes with fewer exits perhaps, to minimize transitions if that’s a problem.
Plenty of interstates have a two-tier lane system, one tier with lots of exits, and an expressway tier with fewer exits/entrances. That is not a new innovation.
Although the risk is that if the machine somehow gets damaged/malfunctions or if a car crashes into it, the setup can become more of a liability than a benefit.
Amazing! Thanks for sharing! This literally made my day. Triggered all sorts of happy dork in me. I had no idea this kind of construction was anything but pure sci-fi.
Very cool! But imagine having a rough day and accidentally running one of the heavy machines into the supporting pillar. It looks pretty tight under there.
I wonder who has the liability if something goes wrong. I would want the government to be liable to drivers (and assume this would be the case). A private company would need to have tons of insurance to be able to cover the death/destruction that could be caused if it collapsed.
As far as I know the heaviest truck allowed on Swiss roads in the first place is around 40 metric tons (exceptional loads that require a permit not included), and the bridge can handle those.
A Swiss newspaper interviewed the workers - they said they liked it a lot more because a) they get to work regular hours but in the shade and b) they have more space, since the traffic goes above them. On a normal worksite they have barely a few metres, since the rest of the road has traffic flowing on it still.
It doesn't sound perfectly pleasant but are you suggesting the noise it too loud or what? Construction work has never been comfortable, and frankly I'm wondering if the shade of the bridge outweights the chaos of having an active roadway above head.
It's open on both sides, it's more like working under a tarp. They seem to be using proper PPE when appropriate, and not be covered in accumulated dust like mine workers.
I've driven over a few of these in Switzerland the last couple (few?) years, none this length but they are used on the autoroute around the Lake Geneva area sometimes. The speed is dropped to 60km/h and enforced by way of speed cameras - I have seen plenty of cars being flashed in the approach to the ramps.
Does anyone know of any good reading material / papers on effective road maintenance and construction? Asphalt quality, longevity, cost, processes, success stories, etc. Cold weather climates would be a bonus.
Not really what you're asking for, but Sacramento's "Fix 50"[0] project is a currently ongoing development project where I can offer some commentary as a citizen who has no knowledge or expertise in this field.
In total honesty, I'm challenged in seeing how there was much in the way of due safety planning performed.
In certain framings, accidents and deaths have more-than doubled during construction[1]. The extreme amount of hyperfocus one (and all the other drivers around them) has to exercise in order to cope with the super-confusing lane changes and dodging other drivers not paying attention to the partial repavement lines completely deviating from the actual lanes, and short ramps, (and much worse when driving against the sun) is mind-boggling and renders the local headlines (even if sensationalist) unsurprising.
I know sarcasm can be an effective way of making a point, but on a global forum where plenty of people are likely to not have a clue what unions do or don't exist in Europe (not to mention most Europeans won't know much if anything about unions in European countries other than their own) it's worth not being sarcastic so that your comment can be understood by more than just the people who already know what you're saying.
So they all think and operate EXACTLY alike? This must be a joke.
If I am wrong then prove it. This is the statement which I have heard a few times already and a cursory search for "unions blocking better road repair technology" in ddg yields these articles which bolsters my argument:
So unions block innovation by insisting the government pays union-level wages to construction workers.
I can tell you what is the difference between unions in Europe and unions in the US. As far as I can tell, unions and paying fair wages are not blamed for lack of innovation in Europe. We do have a lot of news about the fight over wages, but for some reason this antagonist union bashing in the media and general population seems to still be an American phenomenon.
I think you are conflating anti-union sentiment with legitimate concern that unions put the interest of its members ahead of innovation in the name of keeping people employed. No one said down with unions.
fair wages do not prevent innovation. on the contrary. because unhappy employees will also make innovation difficult. i do believe that unions in europe understand that european companies need to innovate more to compete globally.
but unlike some american unions they do not hold the companies hostage. union shops do not exist. they can not demand that every employee joins the union. they do not control what tasks individual employees are allowed to do. they negotiate contracts and work conditions. that's all.
This isn't about wages. This is about maintaining job security. Any kind of automation which promises less labor and/or less time is interpreted as "we dont need as many people as we did before." This is how a union person views these things - job killers.
If you actually read the pages that you linked, you will see nothing of the sort you describe. One page is literally talking about wages only. The other says that unions want companies to train employees so that they are prepared for automation. Anyway, no use discussing here, because apparently facts don't matter.
ah yes, you are right, i didn't think about that. i have to admit that i can't say how european unions would react here, but i think any negotiation on the issue would be based on the idea that automation is fine as long as it does not cost any jobs, but instead the company makes sure that all employees get reassigned and trained to do alternative work. using automation to increase output instead of producing the same output with less people.
at least in germany unions are also favoring reduction of work hours, which is another way workers can benefit from automation without losing their jobs.
The bridge is assembled over 2 nights at a motorway exit (so traffic can bypass it by driving off and immediately back on to the road). During night 1 the two end ramps are assembled and attached together to make a short bridge. During night 2 the ramps are driven apart, the central section is built to reach the full length and the entire structure is driven to the final location.
The entire length is 236 meters long providing a working length of 100 meters underneath. The assembled bridge can flex slightly at the joins between sections, and has a turning radius of 2 kilometers.
They do go into the mechanics of how they make this insanely massive machine drive up a grade that steep, and how they ensure it doesn't slide backward.
I was glued to the screen more than with most movies.
If you like channels like Practical Engineering, you will enjoy this.
i was going to say something similar. this was better than the action movie i saw earlier.
Or was it just a silly idea that Musk threw some money at and they've been struggling to justify their existence ever since?
>The mission: solve traffic, enable rapid point-to-point transportation and transform cities
via cheap tunnels. Maybe they won't get there but it's an interesting goal.
There was a derailment of a cargo train the the Gotthard base tunnel last year [1]. It caused a huge amount of damage and one tunnel will be close until September this year. They need to replace 7km of track. If there way anyone to do this correctly faster they would as it is costing millions not having this route open. Concrete needs time to cure etc. some things you can't just make faster because someone said so.
[1] https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/gotthard-base-tunnel-t...
Every Elon company sets super high goal targets. They are often completely unrealistic with current technology but it inspires certain types of people to innovate and it works quite well.
> The Swiss dig a lot of holes from easy to very complex terrain. If there was an easy way go that much faster they would.
Nobody said anything about “easy”. Also, The argument of “the established players don’t work on X so X isn’t possible” doesn’t work.
If the Swiss are happy with their industry the industry isn’t going to risk really capital intense experimentation to do better. See: Innovator’s dilemma
According to the roadmap, another Elon company should have attended fully automated driving years ago.
In addition to that I assume that the 7 miles a day claim assumes 24/7 drilling, whereas I wouldn't be surprised if the swiss were doing 8/5 drilling.
Brilliant!
I really hate being wrong, but it is much better to be wrong a lot, and quickly understand why. The alternative is to try nothing. It’s kinda sad.
The cliché "Worse is better" describes this (turrible) phenomenon. (The flip side being "safety regulations are written in blood.")
I really wish this wasn't the world we live in. I want to live in a world with consequences (and justice). I've been railing against it my whole career. And judging from my meager savings, failing in my efforts.
This has nothing to do with the success or failure of any given company.
Until people die. Then suddenly, you can't cheat any more. And everybody else has to live with your decisions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morton_Thiokol
I wouldn't call that winning.
Yes, iteration requires you to survive. Not sure how that’s relevant. Cutting corners also isn’t necessarily a bad thing - you’re focusing on the extreme example where people die. Cutting corners can also be a careful evaluation of what processes are and aren’t relevant to a given situation but that becomes trickier when it’s enshrined in law. Imagine if guidelines from the 80s about how to write software were enshrined in law.
Regulations more often than not do ignore the flip side in terms of the cost of compliance because it’s difficult to show the counter factual universe in which a regulation may save 10% more lives (or maybe even 0% more lives) but drove up costs by 100x.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects
If Edsger W. Dijkstra's wild ravings from the 80s were enshrined in law, perhaps we wouldn't have quite so many fatalities attributable to crap software. https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/E...
> A number of these phenomena have been bundled under the name "Software Engineering". As economics is known as "The Miserable Science", software engineering should be known as "The Doomed Discipline", doomed because it cannot even approach its goal since its goal is self-contradictory. Software engineering, of course, presents itself as another worthy cause, but that is eyewash: if you carefully read its literature and analyse what its devotees actually do, you will discover that software engineering has accepted as its charter "How to program if you cannot.".
If you have infinite dice rolls this is obviously true. If every dice roll costs you something or indeed everything... heh. Maybe don't just roll it to see what happens?
"but it is much better to be wrong a lot"
I disagree, "Oh the bridge collapesed, I was wrong! But this is much better than being right" - Nope.
I am not saying its ideal and there is no room for improvement, nothing in real world is, but please consider other, 'fast' scenarios for long term (100+ years) existence when not only many lives are at stake.
Falling yes. Killing is hit-or miss. I would be surprised if the reasons bridges are failing due to lack of maintenance is entirely unrelated to the cost of building.
There are many ways things could be better, and many ways things could be worse.
Attacking something only because it's cheaper and faster seems silly.
Cheaper reflects many things, overall quality testing, attention to detail, how much effort went into design etc. Its not a silver bullet but oh boy does it always show on result, without exception.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Scott_Key_Bridge_colla... was not 2 months ago.
> Its not a silver bullet but oh boy does it always show on result, without exception.
Permit me to show you an exception!
This watch is USD59: https://www.target.com/p/men-39-s-timex-expedition-scout-wat...
This watch is GBP225: https://mrjoneswatches.com/products/a-perfectly-useless-even...
There are even more extreme examples, e.g. the watch from Richistan.
They remind me of something more like an early-era discovery channel show like extreme engineering.
They just need to get mike rowe to narrate.
The segue from CG is much more sensible
They make me wonder why these European companies don't compete in US infrastructure projects?
When it is worth it, American public works entities do reach out to German (and other national) companies. As to issues like this specifically? Because the US generally has wider freeways/highways, so is less impacted by single/double lane shutdowns for surfacing. In addition, many states have opted for less long-lasting quick pack asphalt for surface streets which can be resurfaced in place and ready to drive on again in a few hours.
I know it's Internet rhetoric to assume America and it's government are incompetent, but the Civil Corps of Engineers, CalTrans, etc are actually pretty good at their jobs. The biggest horror stories are jobs given to private entities that go overbudget and overtime.
Generally, it's particularly rare (at least in the Western "blue" States) to rely on mostly or, especially, exclusively private public works programs.
Try to open a lemonade stand in other kids neighborhood they will kick you out :)
Now try to do the same where millions or more $ are at stake, good luck with that :)
!!!!
There's a mindbending sentence.
Keep in mind, though, you don't lose a lane of traffic. There is no need to truck in jersey barriers. You don't have to build an entire temporary detour road. You don't pay a consultant $200/hr to design a traffic control plan.
I think the real value is safety. The crew is shielded by the bridge and you have complete grade separation from traffic. That's a lot better than an orange barrel being the only thing between you and a minivan.
NASA demonstrates otherwise.
It’s like Windows with its half-hearted efforts to modernise it’s interface.
The video clearly shows barriers between the workers and the active surface lane.
But this bridge is engineered with solid feet for taking traffic loads. The wheels are only extended for movement and wouldn't be able to take the load of traffic.
That’s because it is. Welcome to the world (in the case of USA, the entire country) car centric transportation.
If the road is anywhere close to max capacity this will cause traffic jams either way.
at least where I live you'll often seen lane reductions measured in weeks for repaving.
With all that equipment and manpower.
If the bridge was supported by flexible rubber tyres while heavy trucks were driving over the top of it, it'd probably wobble enough to make everyone involved uncomfortable.
Another option is what they do in Japan - just get 10X the number of people on it, with all the tools for the entire job and then do it all overnight.
Also, nice to see good old "dude with shovel" in there, a tool that would have looked the same back in the 19th century.
This is for simple road resurfacing, which is usually done in a day or two anyway.
There are a lot of factors as to why road construction takes a long time, but the biggest reason is safety. They aren't completely closing the road in most cases so while a large section might be coned off, they are moving the worker protection (vehicle barriers) around from section to section.
Lots of specialized expensive equipment is involved where you might be waiting a week just for the thing you need to become available. Same with specialized workers and sub-contractors. Add in time you might just need to wait for concrete to harden to the point its safe to move a big piece of equipment onto it for the next phase.
Construction is a scheduling nightmare. You can throw money at the problem, but it is in the end tax dollars and rarely is there a good reason.
Everyone can name a stretch of highway they've seen treated this way, and this explanation just doesn't cover it.
You don't know just from driving by whether 99.9% of projects are quick and efficient.
I think there's an inherent bias here. Each individual is not seeing that section of road 24/7. At most they see it for a few minutes (or perhaps a little longer, if traffic slows enough), maybe once or at most a few times per day. That's a very small fraction of the day, and work could be occurring during other parts of the day, possibly even at night. Safety might require that they do the work when there are few cars driving by, but the nature of the work might be such that they can't unblock the lanes during the day.
I get that this isn't satisfying, but often reality isn't. And I have no doubt that there are plenty of mismanaged projects around the world where there are lots of delays, and long stretches of time when nothing is getting done. But I think it's incorrect to believe that nothing is getting done just because a few people you know drive by the area a few times a day and don't see anyone working.
It also tends to be the case that price is reduced by scheduling work across multiple contractors with independent scheduling... so the cost savings come at the expense of idle periods while waiting for the next contractor to be available. Not a totally unaddressable problem but ultimately fast and cheap are, as usual, opposing requirements. Funding politics can also play a role here, very common that larger projects don't have all of their funding available at once, so they may sit idle while waiting for the next set of funds.
Practical Engineering videos on road construction and public works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIK6I6Q58Ec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22W5tRWbUVI
The problem is that both the workers and the equipment are short in supply.
The cause of that is the lack of continuity in politics. Construction machines and staff training can easily reach dozens of millions of euros in cost - particularly when it's rail related. It would be financial suicide for any company outside of extremely large conglomerates to take on that risk without politics providing the guarantee of at least 20 years worth of projects to recoup that investment. Instead, the US is down to "we can barely plan for the next fiscal year" timeframe, and Europe to "we can barely plan 5 years until the next EU fiscal cycle, add national election cycles and you're down to 1-2 years as well". On top of that come government accounting clusterfucks - basically, the norm is that it is very difficult to transfer budgets from one year to the next, and when you don't use all your budget for whatever reason, next year's budget will be cut back.
For any one stretch of road what percentage of the time is it closed in this way? Or in other words, what is the SLA of the road?
That's because the company that wins the tender knows they're competing on the lowest price, and nobody really cares for time to completion. So they're keeping the construction site as a fallback for other construction sites, that are more important to them and have a higher price tag.
It's the equivalent to preemptive pricing for VMs.
Also this doesn't even have to be a public works type of job. They do this kind of stuff for private works like house construction. 30 people show up and start working, and after couple of days you have 2 guys working for weeks while others are somewhere else.
I was very surprised when I saw repaving of couple of street intersections in Chicago. Those guys did it like they were on a competition. Really fast and really nice. They were done in couple of days. I couldn't believe it. In my part of the world, the same job would take months, and I'm not even kidding.
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/construction/contracts/t508010.cfm
https://transweb.sjsu.edu/sites/default/files/2908-highway-t...
Have you heard about the new invention that will allow <insert name of local department for handling road work> to lay off 90% of its workers?
A shovel that stands up by itself.
This video/article does a good basic job explaining why it can take so long: https://practical.engineering/blog/2020/6/1/why-does-road-co...
edit: I think someone linked this down below too.
Isn't some of that due to earth settling that you can't really speed up? I remember a fun fact from many years ago where I was growing up. They built a new interstate bridge/overpass, and it wasn't too long after that they noticed it starting to sink. Well it turns out they had drilled sample cores down to like 100 feet, and had good results, but after the sinking, they drilled new cores, and there was a layer of sandstone or something at like 105 feet. I don't really remember how it all got sorted out, but it was under construction for a long time.
While the I was surprised at how recently the flat broom was invented (the very tail end of the 18th century), the job he's doing with a broom goes back to antiquity.
I grew up occasionally using tools of the shovel-variety which sometimes were from the 19th century, and when not, not far off.
Every time I drive through particularly ornery construction I start to fantasize about writing software to optimize the critical path and driver disruption.
I also am left wondering having seen several iterations of "improvement" projects that were followed a number of years later on the same stretch of road with another project... if anybody analyzes the whole effect of the project and if the designed improvement made up for the considerable interruption executing it caused. Like on a "net-positive" basis, would folks have been better off if nothing at all was done and the project just skipped.
You can get as many workers as you need, for a price.
For example, got a 2 day window at Christmas to perform a rail upgrade? And overrunning on time costs thousands of pounds per minute? Just show up with a large workforce and lots of spare parts and equipment.
The downside is you end up paying for things like having a couple of diesel mechanics on site just in case a backhoe breaks down. Maybe none of your backhoes broke down, and you paid for 2 guys times 48 hours times 3x their normal hourly rate, just to sit in their truck.
Of course, overnight work does tend to get noise complaints from locals - no amount of workers will solve that!
Meanwhile, just down the road from me, we've had a major bridge closed since April of last year, and is due to reopen October 2024....
Videos like this should be a lesson to Civic planners everywhere.
Japanese rail projects aren't particularly fast. The subway line that was connected in this 3 hour switch started construction in 2001, finished in 2008, and the connection made in the video was completed in 2013. https://ja-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/%E6%9D%B1%E4%...
This project for example started in 2006 and opened last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Kanagawa_Rail_Link
---
One other thing that makes the 3 hour window possible is the sheer amount of manpower they throw at the problem during these three hours. the US does not have a project construction industry built around swarming, but rather maintaining a lower cost small crew at all times. One reason why there is so much construction in Japan is because the government has relied on fiscal stimulus to the point where it now has the highest debt-to-GDP in the world at a rate of 263%.
IIRC it’s something like if a state can fix a damaged/destroyed freeway in under sixty days the feds pay for it entirely.
They have no appetite for anything new and they have no appetite for not being the one who thought of it.
https://youtu.be/dMvmhyGgaq4?si=YXMt5tWpuNVXkcT7 (not necessarily the one I’m thinking of)
Also, the speed limit on these bypasses is 60 km/h, so they are halving the bandwidth and create massive congestions during peak hours. Probably the reason they stopped using them recently and just close the highway for few hours at night instead.
So reducing the speed limit down to 60/h actually increases the capacity of the road, and reduces the likelihood of rolling traffic jams occurring or persisting.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Road-capacity-change-wit...
Having not yet read the paper, I am curious if this was factoring in just typical average speed or if lower speeds are also going to have fewer/less severe accidents (accidents having an outsized impact on my road delays).
https://www.astra.admin.ch/astra/de/home/themen/nationalstra...
reading the abstract, it looks like the study in question is for city blocks? I'm not sure how applicable it is to highways.
Currently in use 6 April - 17 August 2024 on the A1 in Solothurn, apparently.
"We used to drive on the left, we now drive on what's left"
I'm pretty sure most of the damage are from construction company lorries. I wonder why the gov doesn't just tax them for their usage/destruction of public roads, and fund repairs with that?
Because the lorry owners (construction and transportation co.) would bitch and fight tooth and nail against that, rise the transport costs and... everyone would claim the roads aren't repaired anyway.
Source: living in a country what did exactly that. Oh, they bitched hard.
You're ranting at the wrong group, they are just trying to get the most done in the least amount of time and disruption, hence lowest cost.
I dunno, I have three cats, a big part of my life revolves around them, and it's pretty great.
(I know, I know...)
When there are little cars you wouldn't say that there is traffic. That's just how the language is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHzzSao6ypE
Also, cars create mobility issues by injuring people.
This is how train networks the world over were built, with train companies buying up land and then developing or leasing it out after their railways made it valuable. It's how successful transit companies operate in Asia and remain profitable, building shopping malls and hotels on and around their stations.
It doesn't require population density (that comes after the development), it doesn't require government support (although it helps, especially if the government is subsidizing roads), but it does require investment and long-term planning.
People have a right to travel the way they want, and pay tax money to do so.
Climate change isn’t some doomsday. Relax about it, I promise you that you and billions of others will be fine. Many of us are tired of living our lives for the Doomsday Climate Cult.
What you want is a train.
decades of peer reviewed, real world verifiable evidence against your recommendation exists, and every single municipality responsible for maintaining roads the world over now plans for this actuality.
Can yu provide a single example of expanding lanes on a public thoroughfare reduced congestion? SEE: LA, Baltimore, etc.
...as long as they only want to travel by car.
And the way to do that is to give people alternatives to driving.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCzCJzwrB_c
First, I'm guessing the cardboard boxes they filled with road material are for testing / QA of the blend?
Second, the "bridge" structure that allows traffic to keep flowing is very cool, but I'm assuming you have to stop traffic to get it into place to begin with. Seems unlikely they are moving that structure while traffic drives over it. Of course placing that structure should take much less time than the resurfacing process, but how much time? Minutes? Hours?
It's basically a one-time capital cost for the "mobile bridge" and then they can use it repeatedly; not sure it really ends up being better overall than the usual American "divide and conquer" method used, where they do a lane at a time and divert traffic around. The denser the area the more valuable it'll be, I presume.
Otherwise I take your point.
Of course there is also that the US is caught up in car culture so we massively overbuild infrastructure and end up paying trillions for it later.
The difference isn't corporatism, it is about competence and civic engagement.
/jealous American
Texas definitely throws money at the problem. Although lately they're optimizing their spend for larger checks to fewer contractors on bigger roads. Simplifies all the kickbacks I'm sure.
"Ja, natuerlich. Das Effizientestrassenerneuerungkasten."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymyIEGRw4-U&t=4m7s
I'm guessing it's pretty rare for the results to come back as "tear it all out and start over", but... you'd sure want to know if that were the case!
In general the entire bridge is as maneuverable as a 230m structure can be. The individual segments are designed to articulate. So once it's set up you can move it around to any other patch of road surface in the area.
Theoretically I understand that bad traffic results in bad economy and less taxes, but in reality those things are so far away from each other to not make any influence.
When it comes to locals, they are much more apt to be voted out by not repairing potholes, then state/national levels where people tend to vote on party lines.
But, back to your road issues, I'm guessing you missed the part where some underlying infrastructure has gone bad, water and sewer pipes the most common culprits were fixed. If traffic were allowed to drive over the problematic pipes it would have made the issue much worse much faster leading to the entire street getting dug up.
From a network engineer standpoint this sounds like false advertisement ;-) ("Your server can be moved to another rack non-disruptively. We just need to disconnect your network cable and connect it to another switch.")
But still, this is pretty cool
It's obviously safer to have one-directional traffic than bi-directional traffic, so the bridge makes sense. The throughput is also higher.
Except now whatever is orchestrating that redundancy is a new point of some seriously messed up failure (or even just management, testing, and setup) that you never had before ;)
> Speed bumps (also called traffic thresholds, speed breakers or sleeping policemen) are a class of traffic calming devices that use vertical deflection to slow motor-vehicle traffic in order to improve safety conditions
It's just a difference of degree of deflection.
2. there are many other types of traffic calming devices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming#Measures
2. Horizontal deflection and blocking access (usually requiring more distance to be covered) both increase maintenance on vehicles; by my count, three out of four categories of traffic calming increase maintenance on vehicles --- it's clearly an allowed part of the design. Going back several comments, blocking access often makes cycling much worse too. As can narrowing, depending on how its done.
By individual items: there's 6 items in narrowing, which I think is reasonable to say don't increase maintenance. There's 8 vertical deflections, which are all increasing. There's three in horizontal deflection, I'll give you roundabouts (I've argued enough about those elsewhere), so that's 2 more increasing and 1 not. For blocking, there's four, all of which are likely to increase travel distance.
So 6 + 1 = 7 vs 8 + 2 + 4 = 14. 7 out of 21 is the vast majority?
Pot holes clearly fit under vertical and horizontal deflection. Possibly block or restrict access. Deferred maintenance could be a general category of traffic calming.
Speed bumps are relatively gradual changes in height relative to pot holes. A properly built speed bump driven over at an appropriate speed doesn't "shock" your vehicle.
https://www.losaltosonline.com/news/here-we-go-again-el-cami...
"Thank you for the courage of the engineers and responsible authority not to give up despite the (failed) first attempt and to dare a second improved attempt."
In addition to the technical performance, there is an equally remarkable social performance.
They have a horrible habit of performing this kind of work during the worst possible times.
All of the college students will be gone for the summer and things will be nice and quiet. Then the students return and football season begins. Town becomes a mess. Then the City of Auburn start resurfacing roads or adding medians or additional lanes.
It's happened every year for the past 14 years that I've been a resident. It never fails. They always wait until school starts back before they begin any repairs.
I wish I could find the depiction — it was a ramp with cars passing over just like that (a lot shorter however) that would drive very slowly along, paving as it went.
I also think every one of those workers under that bridge should be wearing some type of respiratory filter for their long term health.
We're already used to overhead infrastructure with the L all over the city.
example: https://i4express.com/
2: They're ugly.
Although the risk is that if the machine somehow gets damaged/malfunctions or if a car crashes into it, the setup can become more of a liability than a benefit.
Sometimes... it doesn't work out.
https://www.londonreconnections.com/2015/know-run-story-behi...
https://www.nzz.ch/schweiz/astra-bridge-so-funktioniert-die-...
Kinda like the EU, except that each state is still a sovereign country.
In total honesty, I'm challenged in seeing how there was much in the way of due safety planning performed.
In certain framings, accidents and deaths have more-than doubled during construction[1]. The extreme amount of hyperfocus one (and all the other drivers around them) has to exercise in order to cope with the super-confusing lane changes and dodging other drivers not paying attention to the partial repavement lines completely deviating from the actual lanes, and short ramps, (and much worse when driving against the sun) is mind-boggling and renders the local headlines (even if sensationalist) unsurprising.
[0]: https://www.fix50.com/
[1]: https://archive.ph/8vmzu
(I know mine sure can’t)
Precise, efficient, fast.
I would love to see that on this side of the pond, but I'm not holding my breath.
If I am wrong then prove it. This is the statement which I have heard a few times already and a cursory search for "unions blocking better road repair technology" in ddg yields these articles which bolsters my argument:
Directly related: https://www.aei.org/economics/america-in-the-slow-lane-how-u...
Tangentially related:
https://uniontrack.com/blog/unions-and-automation
https://www.illinoispolicy.org/union-workers-more-likely-to-...
I can tell you what is the difference between unions in Europe and unions in the US. As far as I can tell, unions and paying fair wages are not blamed for lack of innovation in Europe. We do have a lot of news about the fight over wages, but for some reason this antagonist union bashing in the media and general population seems to still be an American phenomenon.
but unlike some american unions they do not hold the companies hostage. union shops do not exist. they can not demand that every employee joins the union. they do not control what tasks individual employees are allowed to do. they negotiate contracts and work conditions. that's all.
at least in germany unions are also favoring reduction of work hours, which is another way workers can benefit from automation without losing their jobs.