Road Construction - General Question About Timing

[djc311]

Without intentionally trying to offend any road engineers, I'd like to know the logic of how road construction projects get scheduled. I'm not talking 12-18 month projects, I'm referring to much smaller, simpler repair work.

Here's a specific example - located near 180th & Harrison, there's a middle school about 500' north of the intersection that has one main road on the south side of the school for drop off. It was in pretty bad shape at the end of the school year last year, and the road sat untouched all summer. School began and now they've torn up one side of the road to pour concrete, and then they tore up the other side. Obviously during drop off and pickup, it only makes things worse. The portion of road is probably less than 20' in length... why couldn't this have been planned and addressed around the school year? Meaning, do it in the summer.

This brings up another road construction project on Harrison that's taking place now - they're repaving east of 180th & Harrison to about 185th... there's the middle school that I mentioned above that's impacted and also an elementary school just to the east of 180th & Harrison (Wheeler Elementary) that now have to fight the repaving process. There's a dedicated turn lane on Harrison that isn't accessible at this time as it's now been reallocated as the main east or west lane, so people turning left off Harrison back up everyone else.

Understanding there's never going to be a "perfect" time to perform these projects, I don't know why they can't plan better and try to cause fewer headaches by doing them when school is out. Knowing the repaving work is much more involved than replacing a couple sections of concrete, perhaps that's more challenging (although the entire thing could probably be done in a week's time with less traffic). But I've seen driveways and parking lots get torn up and repoured in the same day.

My main gripe about the repaving on Harrison is they did an extremely poor job of placing signs when they tore off the top layer, and cars were hitting the bumps extremely hard. I was aware because I live nearby, but there are a lot of people driving through the area that don't know about the work. They also didn't place signs stating specific directions would be closed on specific days (ie, the northbound lane through 180th & Harrison was not usable yesterday morning), so everyone was trying to figure out in the dark where they could go because they were doing this at 7am.

Trust me, I want the roads to be in the best condition possible, but I feel the city and/our counties do a poor job of making it less stressful on drivers. Another pain point is right in front of Millard South - it's almost like clockwork that they'll tear out a section of Q St every single year during the school year for some reason. This inevitably takes Q St from 4 lanes with a dedicated east/west turn lane down to a 2 lane road.

[Stan]

Instead of writing it all out myself, I had Copilot write it up and this is all pretty much spot on from my experience. The execution phase also has to take into account weather and roadblocks that might come up during that time. I remember one bridge job in Arkansas that was constantly stopped due to archealogical and bone finds that needed identification before it could proceed. My guess is that for a simple road project, the contractor would have preferred to do it earlier, but maybe they had all their crews on another project during the summer.


1. Project Planning and Scope Definition
Assess the condition of the road and determine the need for reconstruction.

Define the scope of work: length of road, materials, timeline, budget, and technical specifications.

Conduct environmental and traffic impact studies if required.

2. Budgeting and Funding
Allocate funds from the city budget or secure state/federal grants.

Include contingencies for unexpected costs.

3. Procurement and Bidding
Prepare a Request for Proposals (RFP) or Invitation to Bid (ITB) detailing the project scope, requirements, and evaluation criteria.

Advertise the bid publicly to ensure transparency and competition.

Hold pre-bid meetings to clarify project details for interested contractors.

4. Contractor Selection
Review submitted bids for compliance, cost, experience, and qualifications.

Evaluate based on technical capability, past performance, and proposed timeline.

Award the contract to the most suitable bidder, often the lowest responsive and responsible one.

5. Permitting and Licensing
Ensure the selected contractor holds all necessary licenses and certifications.

Obtain required permits for construction, environmental impact, and traffic control.

6. Contract Finalization
Draft and sign a formal contract outlining deliverables, payment terms, penalties, and legal obligations.

Include clauses for safety, insurance, and dispute resolution.

7. Project Execution
Begin construction with oversight from city engineers or project managers.

Monitor progress, safety compliance, and quality control.

Communicate with the public about road closures or detours.

8. Inspection and Completion
Conduct final inspections to ensure the road meets all specifications.

Address any deficiencies or punch-list items.

Approve final payment and officially close the project.

[djc311]

Instead of writing it all out myself, I had Copilot write it up and this is all pretty much spot on from my experience. The execution phase also has to take into account weather and roadblocks that might come up during that time. I remember one bridge job in Arkansas that was constantly stopped due to archealogical and bone finds that needed identification before it could proceed. My guess is that for a simple road project, the contractor would have preferred to do it earlier, but maybe they had all their crews on another project during the summer.


1. Project Planning and Scope Definition
Assess the condition of the road and determine the need for reconstruction.

Define the scope of work: length of road, materials, timeline, budget, and technical specifications.

Conduct environmental and traffic impact studies if required.

2. Budgeting and Funding
Allocate funds from the city budget or secure state/federal grants.

Include contingencies for unexpected costs.

3. Procurement and Bidding
Prepare a Request for Proposals (RFP) or Invitation to Bid (ITB) detailing the project scope, requirements, and evaluation criteria.

Advertise the bid publicly to ensure transparency and competition.

Hold pre-bid meetings to clarify project details for interested contractors.

4. Contractor Selection
Review submitted bids for compliance, cost, experience, and qualifications.

Evaluate based on technical capability, past performance, and proposed timeline.

Award the contract to the most suitable bidder, often the lowest responsive and responsible one.

5. Permitting and Licensing
Ensure the selected contractor holds all necessary licenses and certifications.

Obtain required permits for construction, environmental impact, and traffic control.

6. Contract Finalization
Draft and sign a formal contract outlining deliverables, payment terms, penalties, and legal obligations.

Include clauses for safety, insurance, and dispute resolution.

7. Project Execution
Begin construction with oversight from city engineers or project managers.

Monitor progress, safety compliance, and quality control.

Communicate with the public about road closures or detours.

8. Inspection and Completion
Conduct final inspections to ensure the road meets all specifications.

Address any deficiencies or punch-list items.

Approve final payment and officially close the project.

This will show my unfamiliarity here... but would a project that involved chopping up two squares of a road involve all of the above, spread across several months?

I can appreciate a repave may be a bigger project...

[Stan]

For a smaller project, they probably still had to do funding, contract, design, permitting, etc. I think people reminisce for simpler times when they'd just have a contractor come in and do the work with no regard for codes, ethics, and such.

[Brad]

Usually most small road projects adjacent to a school do start out with a deadline that would have them completed before school starts in the fall. However there are any number of reasons that they can get delayed. You can have contractors that poorly manage the project, but there are also a lot of other factors that delay these projects. We did one project it took OPPD way longer than expected to move the power poles back away from the new road. We had another project Century Link or Cox wouldn't ever show up to move their equipment. We have had other projects where a culvert was involved in the project and the soil didn't settle as fast as expected under the surcharge so that delayed the whole project for several weeks.

Most city and county projects are planned out a long time. But if they are showing up and only replacing one or two panels of concrete, that's usually more of an emergency repair or the concrete was removed for utility work.

[BRoss]

We did one project it took OPPD way longer than expected to move the power poles back away from the new road.

Speaking of this, Q Street between 192nd & 204th appears to be way behind schedule for this same reason - or perhaps other utilities. I've been wondering since early this summer if they needed to move some of the wooden poles for this. The larger transmission lines were done last year, but these were still left as is.

From looking at the webcams, they have also seemed to have had a lot of weather delays due to frequent rain making things soggy, sometimes for many days at a time due to pooling. While we haven't had a crazy amount of rain (we are still technically under average this year), it has been frequent enough to where things haven't really been able to dry out enough for long periods this year. And not having the right conditions will certainly delay things.

But either way, these poles still have not been addressed and it's clear now that they need to move before they can continue paving the north side as well as continuing east (there's single pole on the south side in the way). And with where we are in the year, that window is quickly coming to a close.

I'm guessing this will drag into the middle of next year at the earliest, although I hope I'm wrong.