[mike_d]

> 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.

[utensil4778]

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.

[spenczar5]

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.

[anonymousab]

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.

[kelnos]

> 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.

[jcrawfordor]

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.

[kbrosnan]

Roadbed settling and concrete curing are two long term inactive construction projects.

Practical Engineering videos on road construction and public works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIK6I6Q58Ec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22W5tRWbUVI

[mschuster91]

> 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.

[bagels]

Sometimes the work is done at night. Sometimes, they just tear up the road and do nothing for a year.

[jefurii]

Stretches of freeway in Bakersfield and Santa Clarita have been under construction for decades.

[akira2501]

You're looking through the lens backwards.

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?

[Vaslo]

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.

[fbdab103]

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.