Road resurfacing during the daytime without stopping traffic [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
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.
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.
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
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.
"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.
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?
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.
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.".
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.
Brilliant!
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.
> The Swiss machine in the
> video did 400m in 4 months.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s because it is. Welcome to the world (in the case of USA, the entire country) car centric transportation.
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.
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.
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!
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...
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.
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.
Practical Engineering videos on road construction and public works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIK6I6Q58Ec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22W5tRWbUVI
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.
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?
You don't know just from driving by whether 99.9% of projects are quick and efficient.
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.
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.
> Also, nice to see good old
> "dude with shovel" in there,
> a tool that would have looked
> the same back in the 19th
> century.
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.
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.
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.
Currently in use 6 April - 17 August 2024 on the A1 in Solothurn, apparently.
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...
reading the abstract, it looks like the study in question is for city blocks? I'm not sure how applicable it is to highways.
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...
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.
"We used to drive on the left, we now drive on what's left"
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.
When there are little cars you wouldn't say that there is traffic. That's just how the language is.
I dunno, I have three cats, a big part of my life revolves around them, and it's pretty great.
(I know, I know...)
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.
And the way to do that is to give people alternatives to driving.
...as long as they only want to travel by car.
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.
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.
/jealous American
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.
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."
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
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 ;)
It's obviously safer to have one-directional traffic than bi-directional traffic, so the bridge makes sense. The throughput is also higher.
> 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.
(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.