You don’t fix a road with a dude and a shovel. The horror you’re seeing there is exactly what happens to a road when you just keep shoveling gravel and cold mix when you need to do at least a mill and overlay, but probably a full-depth repair.
And when you start doing stuff like that now you’ve got to start planning around the underground utilities. Beneath the road you may have water, sewer, gas, electricity, telecoms and more. You’ve got manholes, handholes, storm sewer. And on top of that, half the owners on either side of the road don’t know where their property line is and they’ve installed irrigation systems in the ROW without a permit and the contractors hit water lines they don’t know about every hundred feet, stopping work and costing more money.
And all of this has to be coordinated with the various utility providers to try and make sure yout plans and theirs align. You don’t want to spend millions fixing a road only to have the gas company come in a week later cutting a bunch of trenches and holes they just fill back with a patch, causing the road to fall apart in 2 years instead of 20.
That sounds like corruption. A guy with a shovel doesn’t cost that much.
You don’t fix a road with a dude and a shovel. The horror you’re seeing there is exactly what happens to a road when you just keep shoveling gravel and cold mix when you need to do at least a mill and overlay, but probably a full-depth repair.
And when you start doing stuff like that now you’ve got to start planning around the underground utilities. Beneath the road you may have water, sewer, gas, electricity, telecoms and more. You’ve got manholes, handholes, storm sewer. And on top of that, half the owners on either side of the road don’t know where their property line is and they’ve installed irrigation systems in the ROW without a permit and the contractors hit water lines they don’t know about every hundred feet, stopping work and costing more money.
And all of this has to be coordinated with the various utility providers to try and make sure yout plans and theirs align. You don’t want to spend millions fixing a road only to have the gas company come in a week later cutting a bunch of trenches and holes they just fill back with a patch, causing the road to fall apart in 2 years instead of 20.