Road resurfacing during the daytime without stopping traffic [video]

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.

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.

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)

and has a turning radius

!!!!

There's a mindbending sentence.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Some go on for years it seems.

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.

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.

In the UK roadwork sites usually remain much longer than it takes for the result to start deteriorating once they have finished.

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.

    > 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.

Potholes are traffic calming devices you don't even have to pay to install.

You are traffic. Our dependence on car culture made this nightmare we exist in.

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.

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).

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?

And it’s cheaper as well!

You can do lots of cool things with 9 million people and a ton of money.

Yeah, but they use a gas blower! Probably w/o ear protection.

/jealous American

What's wrong with non-uniform denim jeans on a construction site?

Otherwise I take your point.

But below the video they say they are using it again in April 2024.

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.

My concern for the workers is that the bridge traps the particulate matter from the stones and the VOCs from the asphalt. Like working in a mine.

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.

https://www.nzz.ch/schweiz/astra-bridge-so-funktioniert-die-...

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.

Many civic planners will see a video like this and say “that’s not possible” even while watching it happen.

They have no appetite for anything new and they have no appetite for not being the one who thought of it.

You may like this video of a tunnel being built under a highway in one weekend: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=btOE0rcKDC0

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%...

This project for example started in 2006 and opened last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Kanagawa_Rail_Link

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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%.

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.

This is in Switzerland, where the incentives for the government are usually a bit more efficiently aligned with the citizen's wishes.

This video shows how the structure is built. https://youtu.be/Yso0ADvqN-M?feature=shared

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.

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.

example: https://i4express.com/

1: They're very expensive to build.

2: They're ugly.

It varies from state to state...

Kinda like the EU, except that each state is still a sovereign country.

That's an emphatic no.

The video showed semis with trailers riding it, but it was unclear if the weight rating was the same (can the trailer be fully loaded?).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMXfU8blPMM

That's cool.

Sometimes... it doesn't work out.

https://www.londonreconnections.com/2015/know-run-story-behi...

I saw that and wondered if they were samples for analysis (of what? in cardboard boxes??).

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.

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.