[HN Gopher] Road resurfacing during the daytime without stopping...
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Road resurfacing during the daytime without stopping traffic
[video]
Author : sschueller
Score : 835 points
Date : 2024-05-07 15:36 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| CarVac wrote:
| I wish they showed the mobile bridge in motion.
| 2024throwaway wrote:
| Extremely cool video. Very cool technique as well. Two questions.
|
| 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?
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| gustavatmel wrote:
| This video shows how the structure is built.
| https://youtu.be/Yso0ADvqN-M?feature=shared
| 2024throwaway wrote:
| Super cool! Thanks for sharing.
| Aromasin wrote:
| I love to see infrastructure jobs like this that don't interfere
| with people's daily lives. A similar feeling when I watch the
| Japanese build a subway in just 3 hours:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BYW4YYqG5A
|
| 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.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| 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
|
| ---
|
| 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%.
| bombcar wrote:
| The US can swarm when needed and paid for - usually when a
| major traffic artery is dead because of a disaster.
|
| IIRC it's something like if a state can fix a
| damaged/destroyed freeway in under sixty days the feds pay
| for it entirely.
| sva_ wrote:
| You may like this video of a tunnel being built under a highway
| in one weekend: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=btOE0rcKDC0
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| 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.
| travoc wrote:
| They often work under a different set of political or
| administrative constraints that make these things impossible
| to execute. Seeing it done on one stretch of road is entirely
| different than allocating 100 miles worth of repaving budget
| to a 5 mile stretch to avoid inconvenience. That's a tough
| sell.
| bombcar wrote:
| And they do do things when it's warranted, like the bridge
| replacements where they build a whole new bridge next to
| the existing one and swap it overnight.
|
| https://youtu.be/dMvmhyGgaq4?si=YXMt5tWpuNVXkcT7 (not
| necessarily the one I'm thinking of)
| hackernewds wrote:
| high minimum wages, stringest property and workers laws, speedy
| construction - pick two
| Torkel wrote:
| Yes, please! 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.
|
| 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.
| soco wrote:
| 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?
| aidenn0 wrote:
| There's an old joke that works almost everywhere:
|
| 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.
| blowski wrote:
| I had an eccentric Maths teacher at school who used to
| stare out of the window and make odd claims. One was that
| he was running a roadworks business using telekinetic
| powers, and all the people in hi-vis jackets were merely
| scarecrows.
| stormdennis wrote:
| 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.
| froddd wrote:
| In the UK roadwork sites usually remain much longer than it
| takes for the result to start deteriorating once they have
| finished.
| eterevsky wrote:
| 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.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> getting 10x workers at night is not very feasible._
|
| 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!
| lostlogin wrote:
| The same breakdowns happen with slow roadworks. It's just
| that the cost of taking 3 months longer isn't factored in.
| Me sitting in a jam is an externalised cost that they don't
| care about.
| TylerE wrote:
| In my Southern state they prefer to work at night because
| of how hot it is during the day. Something that could
| reasonably be called 'Summer' runs from about March to
| September here. More in some years. It was in the 70s New
| Years Day here this year.
| groestl wrote:
| > 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.
| jq-r wrote:
| Exactly! And it doesn't even have to be a fallback. The same
| company could have won (or "won" if you know what I mean)
| many/majority of those tenders and are intentionally spread
| thin. Because once you win it, you leave a token crew there,
| and move to win another one, leave token crew again and
| again. So they're just doing everything all at once very
| slowly while being paid a lot.
|
| 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.
| groestl wrote:
| All of that is very true, including the bit about private
| works.
| hiatus wrote:
| Are there no deadlines in these contracts or penalties where
| the company is charged X/day until completion?
| floxy wrote:
| There are/can be incentives/penalties to complete road
| construction on time. Although I'm sure it varies with
| jurisdiction.
|
| https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/construction/contracts/t508010.cfm
|
| https://transweb.sjsu.edu/sites/default/files/2908-highway-
| t...
| bombcar wrote:
| Many of the cases that I know of where a performance
| bonus existed (like $million for every day the estimate
| is beaten) they finished ahead of schedule and under
| budget.
| floxy wrote:
| >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.
| swores wrote:
| I wonder (and maybe someone here will know) whether that
| means they were foolishly cutting corners and should have
| sampled further than 100ft down, or if what they did was
| considered best practise and they were just unlucky to find
| themselves in a freak situation?
| bombcar wrote:
| Likely the second - they usually base drilling depth on the
| known area and a wide margin, so everyone probably thought
| 75 feet was fine, do a hundred to be safe.
| swores wrote:
| Thanks
| mike_d wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| kbrosnan wrote:
| 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
| kelnos wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| 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.
| akira2501 wrote:
| 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?
| bagels wrote:
| Sometimes the work is done at night. Sometimes, they just
| tear up the road and do nothing for a year.
| spenczar5 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 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.
| jefurii wrote:
| Stretches of freeway in Bakersfield and Santa Clarita have
| been under construction for _decades_.
| Vaslo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >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.
| avar wrote:
| > Also, nice to see good old > "dude with shovel" in
| there, > a tool that would have looked > the
| same back in the 19th > century.
|
| The guy using a flat broom at around 1:12 in the video has him
| beat.
|
| 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.
| softgrow wrote:
| And in Japan it seems that every time you drive somewhere after
| 10pm there are roadworks everywhere (on the non-toll roads).
| Very pretty with kaleidoscopic lights but it takes just as long
| late at night to move around as earlier on.
| JaggedJax wrote:
| One of the largest time components can be due to soil
| compaction. This period can look like no work is being done,
| but is a vital step. That's not to say that sometimes no work
| is being done because of scheduling, equipment, funds, or any
| number of other reasons.
|
| 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.
| fennecfoxy wrote:
| A shovel is a shovel, a glass is a glass.
| bizzleDawg wrote:
| Does anyone know how the full width of the carriageway gets
| surfaced in this setup? Perhaps lane closures on the left/right
| side (sequentially) after the centre portion has been resurfaced?
| wongarsu wrote:
| 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.
| comebhack wrote:
| There is some more detail on the bridge itself in this video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tpv6n1ykfA
|
| 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.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| 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.
| leni536 wrote:
| I would think that merely repositioning can be done
| overnight.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| hence why the work requiring the stopping and redirecting
| happens at night.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| They can only complete 100m once every 12 hours?
| bobthepanda wrote:
| with minimal road disruption, though.
|
| at least where I live you'll often seen lane reductions
| measured in weeks for repaving.
| TylerE wrote:
| I've seen projects to pave only a few miles take _years_.
| Not even roads that are that busy, even.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| That doesn't sound right, assuming a lane width of 3.5m,
| they can only resurface roughly 29 square meters an
| hours?
|
| With all that equipment and manpower.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| you need to scrape all the way to the base and then fill
| back in when repaving. and you also can't lay asphalt in
| rain.
| ragebol wrote:
| I was under the impression the bridge rolled forward as the
| works continue.
| michaelt wrote:
| Possibly, but unlikely IMHO - it looks like the bridge
| deploys rigid hydraulic outriggers when stationary, and
| changes to flexible pneumatic tyres when moving.
|
| 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.
| krisoft wrote:
| I don't think ragebol meant that the bridge rolls forward
| with traffic on it. Just that once a 100m long stretch is
| finished they can roll the bridge 100m forward with the
| traffic re-routed or suspended during the repositiong. If
| they time it right the resurfacing can be done with
| minimal disruption in the dead of night.
| red_admiral wrote:
| Half right. At night, they direct all traffic onto the
| shoulder / emergency lane and roll the bridge forward 100m
| with no traffic going over it at the time. By day, the
| bridge is stationary, traffic goes over it, and work goes
| on underneath.
| tromp wrote:
| It would be awesome if the the entire bridge could slowly
| move as one _while_ traffic keeps flowing over it. That would
| require far more and far bulkier wheels than the current ones
| designed to carry only one support segment. That will have to
| remain the stuff of fantasies...
| hkdobrev wrote:
| The bridge could temporarily lift just the 2 ends and
| traffic could continue slowly under the bridge while the
| bridge moves ahead. However, it needs to also raise its
| height for trucks to pass under or alternatively, trucks
| could be temporarily suspended/rerouted from the road while
| the bridge moves.
| cryptonector wrote:
| If you look carefully, it seems that it can. It has wheels,
| and it's probably motorized.
| phire wrote:
| It had wheels and it can move. But only with traffic shut
| down.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Sure, but that can happen at night with minimal
| disruption to traffic as it takes only the time to move
| it, not the time to disassemble, move, and re-assemble.
| itishappy wrote:
| Traffic is currently redirected into the emergency lane 100%
| of the time, so this is still an improvement.
| elaus wrote:
| But usually roads aren't even close to max capacity at night,
| when the shifting happens - which, I imagine, is much less
| stressful and time-critical than doing the whole resurfacing
| in a single night.
| Faaak wrote:
| 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)
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| For a contracting company the videos are exceptionally well
| produced.
|
| 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.
| OJFord wrote:
| I was more impressed by the OP seemingly from Swiss public
| body. The Marti one in GP is exactly the sort of sales demo
| type video I'd expect 'for a contracting company', though
| with lashings of high speed chase or shooting narrated
| video (you know, the 40% ads, 50% rehashing what we've seen
| or telling us what's to come, 10% content variety) for some
| reason.
| mgdlbp wrote:
| For the bridge only, Marti also made a more sufferable
| cut in German, that is on the OP channel
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJLX3C0eg3g)
|
| The segue from CG is much more sensible
| sschueller wrote:
| This one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AV2NcyX7pk is
| insane. Elon's Boring Company is a joke in comparison.
| firebaze wrote:
| Fascinating. Thanks for that link.
| tim333 wrote:
| Elon's company is targeting different things - cheap and
| fast, unlike the company in the video doing technically
| hard but probably not cheap.
| esalman wrote:
| Is fast and cheap always better though.
| jfoutz wrote:
| Fast. Fast always wins. Trying something, regardless of
| outcome teaches something about the world. The more
| trials, the more you roll the dice, the more you learn.
|
| 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.
| 0xFF0123 wrote:
| It does depend on the domain though. Sometimes moving
| slowly and carefully can result in a faster successful
| outcome than throwing shit at a wall and seeing what
| sticks.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Yes, sure fast wins when building a bridge. Or a tunnel.
| Which then collapses. Safe wins, this is not Facebook
| where people share some holiday pictures.
|
| "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.
| trelane wrote:
| If you're opposed to fast and cheap, I have _great_ news
| for you about the cost and pace of construction in the
| US.
| jajko wrote:
| ... which has its own reasons, namely regulations (you
| know, every time there was a new disaster they added
| another one) or maybe some corruption. You don't see
| bridges falling in US regularly killing tons of folks, do
| you.
|
| 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.
| trelane wrote:
| > You don't see bridges falling in US regularly killing
| tons of folks, do you.
|
| 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.
| Ntrails wrote:
| > The more trials, the more you roll the dice, the more
| you learn.
|
| 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?
| acdha wrote:
| Fast wins for something like mobile apps but not
| infrastructure where safety matters and you can't just
| shrug off liability. The Boring Company is a great
| example: fast to market themselves but almost all of
| their projects have fallen through.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Iteration always wins. There may be other constraining
| factors, but if you can violate those to iterate more
| (i.e. cheat), you'll beat your competitors who honor
| those constraints.
|
| This has nothing to do with the success or failure of any
| given company.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _but if you can violate those to iterate more (i.e.
| cheat), you'll beat your competitors who honor those
| constraints._
|
| 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.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| You seem to have misunderstood what I'm saying. Iteration
| is how you learn. Learning through iteration, which is
| known under various names like Wright's law or more
| generally experience curve effects [1], goes hand in hand
| with economies of scale in driving down costs.
|
| 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.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _Imagine if guidelines from the 80s about how to write
| software were enshrined in law._
|
| 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.".
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Depends on the application, but commodifying (easier
| instances of) things that previously required bespoke
| engineering is a legitimate pursuit.
| jounker wrote:
| Move fast and break things runs into problems when "break
| things" translates to collapsed tunnels.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| The boring company isn't move fast and break things. They
| literally just bought a drill and use it like any other
| construction company. There's no innovation at all.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| Well the innovation appears to be, drill smaller holes
| faster, and put less traffic through them.
|
| Brilliant!
| tim333 wrote:
| They started that way, just buying a drill, but are now
| trying to innovate and build their own one. They are just
| starting using Prufrock-3. The Prufrocks are machines the
| Boring company have made themselves. They say "Prufrock's
| medium-term goal is to exceed 1/10 of human walking
| speed, which is 7 miles per day." which is way faster
| than anyone else. The Swiss machine in the video did 400m
| in 4 months. They are also experimenting with evacuated
| tunnels (https://youtu.be/nV07jqwCy0A?t=879) which may
| not go anywhere but is at least an attempt at innovation.
| sschueller wrote:
| "7 miles per day" is all talk and no proof it can
| actually be done. 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.
|
| 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...
| kortilla wrote:
| It's incredible how defensive people get around others'
| ambitious goals.
|
| 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
| j16sdiz wrote:
| > ... medium-term goal is to exceed ...
|
| According to the roadmap, another Elon company should
| have attended fully automated driving years ago.
| avar wrote:
| > The Swiss machine in the > video did 400m in 4
| months.
|
| No, a lot of the time the machine was stationary because
| the needed to manually reinforce what they were about to
| drill through, so the machine wouldn't get trapped and
| buried in gravel. Wouldn't Prufrock-3 be similarly slowed
| down!
|
| 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.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| There's no collapsed tunnels. It's the same technology,
| just a smaller surface area / volume of displacement due
| to not needing exhaust mitigation.
| kortilla wrote:
| Nobody said "break things". Making one specific thing
| reliably, quickly and cheap is a completely different
| approach to the "move fast and break things" approach.
| Teever wrote:
| Is The Boring Company actually targetting anything?
|
| Or was it just a silly idea that Musk threw some money at
| and they've been struggling to justify their existence
| ever since?
| tim333 wrote:
| Their website has:
|
| >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.
| tifik wrote:
| They use a tunnel boring machine to bore a tunnel with a
| 45deg slope.
|
| 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.
| em-bee wrote:
| _I was glued to the screen more than with most movies_
|
| i was going to say something similar. this was better
| than the action movie i saw earlier.
| etrautmann wrote:
| Agreed - most interesting YouTube video I've seen in many
| months.
| baq wrote:
| I watched this at 2x expecting a mildly interesting
| educational video. This was a mistake. Almost forgot to
| blink.
| pwarner wrote:
| I've watched these. They're excellent.
|
| They make me wonder why these European companies don't
| compete in US infrastructure projects?
| deaddodo wrote:
| Because there are American (or Canadian, British, etc)
| companies that do what's necessary for American Civil
| Engineering.
|
| 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.
| p_l wrote:
| Arguably a big chunk of issue is that a lot of projects
| that were built by government now are only paid for by
| government... through the nose.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It's a monopsony, no? So if you ingratiate yourself with
| the buyer, you're in.
| acdha wrote:
| One factor you'll see in many areas of government is the
| second order cost of eliminating civil service positions.
| It's most common to talk about how contractors usually
| end up costing more and being less efficient due to
| additional overhead and conflicts of interest, but
| there's a deeper problem that the government doesn't have
| a staff of people with the knowledge and experience to
| select and manage contractors. That's how you end up in
| situations where none of the alternatives are better than
| eating the cost of a bad plan or accepting a lower
| project lifetime, and because it's a managerial failure
| the blame is often spread between three or more
| organizations and often has no effective accountability.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I think there are some sort of "buy American" restrictions
| for many US infrastructure projects.
| knodi123 wrote:
| > and has a turning radius
|
| !!!!
|
| There's a mindbending sentence.
| latchkey wrote:
| Not all roads are straight.
| picture wrote:
| But often, temporary bridges that can be moved and
| assembled and hold traffic are straight.
| ummonk wrote:
| 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.
| cryptonector wrote:
| No. This bridge _travels_. Look closely: it has wheels and it
| 's motorized.
| Plankaluel wrote:
| Once installed, the bridge can be driven along the road when
| a 100m segment is finished
| ssl232 wrote:
| Presumably the road has to be closed for the bridge to
| travel? I assume this takes place at night.
| tantalor wrote:
| That probably just takes a few hours, easy to do. And you
| can start/stop a few times to let cars go over.
| giantg2 wrote:
| If it's moved slowly enough, I don't see why traffic
| couldn't drive on it.
| phire wrote:
| I guess it's theoretically possible to engineer a bridge
| that can move with traffic on it.
|
| 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.
| shikon7 wrote:
| During the night, there will be 1 lane open in each
| direction (one on the side of the bridge, and one on the
| opposite carriageway), so the bridge can be moved.
| kinnth wrote:
| oh this is cool. I did think for a 2 day setup and 1/2 day
| takedown it wasn't a huge efficiency saving but it is if
| you move it down the road at the same time. As the comment
| above mentions, safety is a huge factor too.
| niccl wrote:
| I think they pave 100 m, wait til it's dried (next day,
| perhaps) then drive the bridge 100 m up the newly paved bit
| and start again. No break
| onthecanposting wrote:
| 100m at 1 lane is around 430SY. That's probably 2hrs of
| milling and an hour of tacking and paving, with maybe another
| hour or so for incidentals. So you may only get half a
| workday of production. For time consuming repairs, like full-
| depth replacement, the setup time cost may not be
| significant.
|
| 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.
| stevage wrote:
| 430SY? What's SY? Square yards?
| onthecanposting wrote:
| Yes. We don't use metric in the USA and you can't make us
| :)
| Log_out_ wrote:
| I have a addon that autoconverts imperial units. Your
| comment is the only thing peaking out of the insanity
| bubble. =)
| Zecc wrote:
| I'm not American, but I would have understood what you
| meant had you written sq yd instead.
| Qwertious wrote:
| >Yes. We don't use metric in the USA and you can't make
| us :)
|
| NASA demonstrates otherwise.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| > no need to truck in jersey barriers.
|
| The video clearly shows barriers between the workers and
| the active surface lane.
| xyst wrote:
| > That seems horribly slow and expensive.
|
| That's because it is. Welcome to the world (in the case of
| USA, the entire country) car centric transportation.
| nefarious_ends wrote:
| I can totally imagine a future version of this that slowly moves
| along the roadway and handles all the roadwork automatically.
| brainzap wrote:
| This morning I noticed the train track at my station got a new
| bed, fully swapped out all stones and bars, over night.
| jcims wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMXfU8blPMM
| chx wrote:
| That's cool.
|
| Sometimes... it doesn't work out.
|
| https://www.londonreconnections.com/2015/know-run-story-behi...
| jeffbee wrote:
| Geez, I hate having to watch Swiss infrastructure projects.
| Living in Zurich completely destroyed any residual respect for
| the way we build in America. Aside from this clever bridge, note
| how many and how extreme the differences are between what you see
| in this video and what you would witness watching an American
| repaving crew. They have a sufficient amount of labor on the job,
| compared to the 3 guys you would see on an American job. They all
| have uniform PPE, instead of jeans and t-shirts. Their equipment
| is clean and looks like it probably works. Site dumpers are
| appropriately scaled for the job. Bigger dump trucks are normal
| cabover trucks instead of insane brodozers. They actually use an
| sufficient quantity of binder, instead of skimping on it because
| American supervisors can't tell the difference. So many
| differences in culture.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| Yeah, but they use a gas blower! Probably w/o ear protection.
|
| /jealous American
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| What's wrong with non-uniform denim jeans on a construction
| site?
|
| Otherwise I take your point.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Pants are also a form of PPE. On such a site you want
| something resistant to cuts, heat/fire and probably also
| chemicals.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Does denim not satisfy PPE requirements for most normal job
| sites? What non-specialized material is better than denim
| at the requirements you explained?
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| You can do lots of cool things with 9 million people and a ton
| of money.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Eh, in the US case it quite often involves "Think of the
| corporate profits!" versus "Think of the corporate profits of
| the lowest bidder!"
|
| 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.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Switzerland is one of the hubs of global capitalism and has
| a lower tax rate than the US.
|
| The difference isn't corporatism, it is about competence
| and civic engagement.
| josefresco wrote:
| We try to avoid Boston traffic by driving at night and then we
| run into... night construction! There's basically no time when
| traffic is reasonable around Boston. I'm pretty certain if they
| gave this equipment to the Mass DOT they'd figure out how to
| modify it to negate any benefit. /rant
| bastardoperator wrote:
| 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).
| pixl97 wrote:
| 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.
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| I agree that cat centric life is awful. However "you are
| traffic" is not the whole picture, not all traffic is created
| equal. Some people are just naturally adept at making
| traffic.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Both quality and quantity matter. Bad drivers can make
| traffic anytime, but if you a good driver leave the house
| at 5PM you are traffic.
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| Correct. That's the biggest downside of car
| infrastructure, we are bound(ed?) by the lowest common
| denominator. Once a slow car is blocking the way we just
| contribute to that same traffic.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Why do Americans think "traffic" means congestion?
| Traffic is the people on the road. You can say things
| like "let me check the traffic" or "the traffic is really
| bad", but if you use the road _you are traffic_. It 's
| nothing to do with congestion, if you use the road you
| are traffic. It's this kind of subtle language mistake
| that reveals a whole country full of main characters: _I
| 'm the one travelling, everyone else is just there for my
| inconvenience_.
| digging wrote:
| Americans just use "traffic" to mean "traffic
| congestion." Nobody is confused by it here.
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| Interesting perspective. Not from thr US and my native
| language is Spanish, where I live traffic really is
| synonym of congestion.
|
| When there are little cars you wouldn't say that there is
| traffic. That's just how the language is.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _I agree that cat centric life is awful._
|
| I dunno, I have three cats, a big part of my life revolves
| around them, and it's pretty great.
|
| (I know, I know...)
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| Oh wow I re-read my comment 5 times and never noticed. I
| also have 3 cats, those are great (:
| TylerE wrote:
| It's awful for some. For others, like those with mobility
| issues it can be the difference between being able to leave
| the house or not.
| fineIllregister wrote:
| It's awful for most. If a person lives long enough, they
| will likely lose the ability to drive. A lack of walkable
| infrastructure basically means social death at that
| point. How many people struggle with the decision to try
| to take the keys away from their parents?
|
| Also, cars create mobility issues by injuring people.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Good pedestrian and transit infrastructure is barrier-
| free. If you can't cross the street and board a train in
| a wheelchair, the lack of pedestrian infrastructure is
| exactly the problem.
| TylerE wrote:
| The train? What train? There isn't a train within 100
| miles of here.
| abenga wrote:
| Exactly.
| TylerE wrote:
| The problem isn't barriers to being a pedestrian. It's
| alternate forms of transit _not existing_. My town barely
| has _bus_ service. The nearest stop is over a mile away,
| and it has a frequency, in theory, of hourly. I live _in
| town_. The bus route sorta serves the historically poor
| section of town and that 's about it. Having a car is not
| optional. We don't have a functional long distance rail
| network, never mind light rail or subways.
| Vaslo wrote:
| Not a nightmare at all - simply add more roads or more lanes
| on major highways where there are backups.
|
| People have a right to travel the way they want, and pay tax
| money to do so.
| acdha wrote:
| People do not pay taxes anywhere near the level needed to
| maintain the existing roads, much less expand them. They
| also do not pay enough for the health costs their driving
| inflicts on the people whose neighborhoods they drive
| through, nor the cost of the climate change we're all
| living through. Similarly, while most countries have free
| movement that does not guarantee availability of space to
| put those extra lanes - your freedom to drive ends where
| other people's property begins.
| Vaslo wrote:
| Governments can buy property. There are lots of things
| that can be cut by government to get more roads - all
| that public assistance that goes to a small portion of
| people can be re-examined and reapportioned to help all
| people via roads rather than a large portion of them who
| are leeches.
|
| 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.
| acdha wrote:
| Leeches? That's quite a loaded term, especially when you
| are asking the government to subsidize your lifestyle.
| presentation wrote:
| Induced demand is a thing, build more roads get more
| traffic. Roads are physically incapable of scaling to
| demand.
| Vaslo wrote:
| Imagine not building something because there will be more
| demand. I don't care if they never scale to 100% demand,
| every additional mile of lane helps.
| abenga wrote:
| Ooh yeah. One more lane will fix it. One more lane, one
| more road, and all your traffic woes will end.
| Vaslo wrote:
| Every mile will help. We can't let perfect be the enemy
| of good. Traffic woes may never end, but they can
| certainly be alleviated.
| abenga wrote:
| Seems to me that all this capacity being added hasn't
| reduced traffic to any meaningful degree. It may be time
| to try reducing the cars on the road by providing
| alternative means of getting around instead.
| digging wrote:
| > Traffic woes may never end, but they can certainly be
| alleviated.
|
| And the way to do that is to give people alternatives to
| driving.
| piperswe wrote:
| When have traffic woes ever been alleviated by adding
| more lanes?
| digging wrote:
| > People have a right to travel the way they want, and pay
| tax money to do so.
|
| ...as long as they only want to travel by car.
| Ringz wrote:
| Translated from one of the newest comments under the video:
|
| "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.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Is it strong enough to have all types of vehicles driving over
| it? Or are heavy machinery and semi trucks told to exit?
| binarymax wrote:
| 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?).
| gnicholas wrote:
| I wonder who has the liability if something goes wrong. I
| would want the government to be liable to drivers (and assume
| this would be the case). A private company would need to have
| tons of insurance to be able to cover the death/destruction
| that could be caused if it collapsed.
| red_admiral wrote:
| As far as I know the heaviest truck allowed on Swiss roads in
| the first place is around 40 metric tons (exceptional loads
| that require a permit not included), and the bridge can
| handle those.
| theptip wrote:
| Amazing! Going further, I was recently wondering why we don't
| just build two-layer (or higher) freeways in areas that have
| heavy congestion. "Express" lanes with fewer exits perhaps, to
| minimize transitions if that's a problem.
| jonwachob91 wrote:
| 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/
| gwbas1c wrote:
| 1: They're very expensive to build.
|
| 2: They're ugly.
| spike021 wrote:
| Meanwhile has anyone here driven El Camino Real from Palo Alto
| south to Sunnyvale? One of the worst roads that continues to get
| worse for years now.
| toast0 wrote:
| Potholes are traffic calming devices you don't even have to pay
| to install.
| gpm wrote:
| Instead you pay a lot more in vehicle maintenance, and you
| make bicycling extremely uncomfortable forcing more people
| into vehicles.
| toast0 wrote:
| That's the case for most traffic calming, isn't it?
| gpm wrote:
| No? Most traffic calming is not designed to send sudden
| shocks through your vehicle that cause extra wear and
| tear.
| toast0 wrote:
| Wikipedia says
|
| > 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.
| kube-system wrote:
| 1. they are being phased out in many locations because of
| that issue
|
| 2. there are many other types of traffic calming devices:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming#Measures
| toast0 wrote:
| 1. Potholes are also being phased out in many locations,
| but apparently not on El Camino.
|
| 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.
| kube-system wrote:
| The vast majority of measures on the list I linked do not
| increase maintenance at all, and certainly don't cause a
| "lot more in vehicle maintenance". Some, like a
| roundabout, may cause driver to spend _less_ in
| maintenance vs. alternative intersection designs.
| toast0 wrote:
| How do you want to count? By category, I see 3 out of 4
| categories that increase vehicle maintenance costs; some
| more than others.
|
| 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.
| kube-system wrote:
| Gentle vertical and horizontal deflections do not put
| undue wear on a car. This is why it is okay for roads to
| have things like turns. When cars go around roundabouts,
| through residential chicanes, or over properly designed
| speed humps at reasonable speeds, it does not put any
| more wear on a car than normal road features.
| gpm wrote:
| What kube-system said, but also:
|
| 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.
| spike021 wrote:
| That's an awful way to think about that.
| xrikcus wrote:
| Don't worry, this year they'll get to it. Honest!
|
| https://www.losaltosonline.com/news/here-we-go-again-el-cami...
| amanda99 wrote:
| Seems kind of miserable to work under that bridge all day while
| trucks are driving over you?
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| 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.
| brainwad wrote:
| 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-...
| pirate787 wrote:
| 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.
| avar wrote:
| It's open on both sides, it's more like working under a tarp.
| They seem to be using proper PPE when appropriate, and not be
| covered in accumulated dust like mine workers.
| phyzome wrote:
| I was mostly thinking of how incredibly loud it would be to do
| all that under a metal roof. Sure hope they've got solid
| hearing protection.
| lxe wrote:
| Does the US road construction process follow the same meticulous
| precision?
| gwbas1c wrote:
| It varies from state to state...
|
| Kinda like the EU, except that each state is still a sovereign
| country.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| That's an emphatic no.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| In the UK, well England more than the rest of the UK, we have a
| system for reducing disruption on the roads during maintenance.
| We just let it go decades without any resurfacing.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| Great technique. Thankfully every vehicle model seems to
| increase in size, durability, and suspension capability to
| mitigate any negative side effects.
| swores wrote:
| And the trend of increasing car sizes means increasing mass
| means increasing damage to roads :/
| nvarsj wrote:
| 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?
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > why the gov doesn't just tax them for their
| usage/destruction of public roads
|
| 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.
| alentred wrote:
| So, you are saying the very same lorries transporting the raw
| material for road resurfacing someplace else? That should one
| profitable business!
| xenadu02 wrote:
| You should see how hard every trucker and good ol' boy here
| in the USA whines and moans about weight limits and blames
| BIG GUMMINT for ruining their day. The fact that they are
| doing exponentially more damage to the pavement, wearing it
| out much faster doesn't occur to them.
| astro- wrote:
| And it's cheaper as well!
| swarnie wrote:
| What's the old saying?
|
| "We used to drive on the left, we now drive on what's left"
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Very Swiss.
|
| Precise, efficient, fast.
|
| I would love to see that on this side of the pond, but I'm not
| holding my breath.
| maxglute wrote:
| Looks like 2 lanes -> 1.5 lanes, does speed change approaching
| ramp?
| leejo wrote:
| 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.
| hyperific wrote:
| I would bet that working in the daytime means fewer workplace
| accidents and increased job satisfaction from workers.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I remember something like this in _Popular Mechanics_ magazine
| (or similar) back in the 70 's or perhaps even earlier. It was
| one of their awesome "artist's concept" piece that depicted more
| of a proposal, or what we might call a pipe dream, ha ha.
|
| 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.
| flaburgan wrote:
| If all that energy could go in something useful like improving
| trains that would be amazing. Us wanting it or not, cars are
| something from the past.
| eps wrote:
| When they first installed this contraption next to us, they
| messed up the incline. It was too steep so one of longer trailer
| trucks promptly got stuck on it ultimately doing just that -
| stopping all traffic on the highway. It was glorious.
|
| 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.
| flakeoil wrote:
| But below the video they say they are using it again in April
| 2024.
| eps wrote:
| Not in my area. Here they stopped.
| red_admiral wrote:
| https://www.astra.admin.ch/astra/de/home/themen/nationalstr
| a...
|
| Currently in use 6 April - 17 August 2024 on the A1 in
| Solothurn, apparently.
| ummonk wrote:
| 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.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| Anecdotally, it seems like I see more wild driving when
| posted speeds are higher. People are more aggressive in
| higher speed zones, which inevitably leads to more crashes.
| Severe accidents being one of those things which can
| dramatically hurt traffic throughput.
| avianlyric wrote:
| Peak bandwidth of roads happens at surprisingly low speeds, you
| wanna maximise bandwidth set the speed limit to about 20km/h
| [1]. Anything higher and road capacity starts reducing.
|
| 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...
| gruez wrote:
| >you wanna maximise bandwidth set the speed limit to about
| 20km/h [1].
|
| reading the abstract, it looks like the study in question is
| for city blocks? I'm not sure how applicable it is to
| highways.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| This is a question I have wondered all the time
| (predominantly while stuck in traffic). Frequently wondered
| if, during rush hour, posted speed limits should be dropped
| by X to actually increased throughput.
|
| 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).
| lasftew wrote:
| Most congested stretches of highway in Switzerland use
| dynamic speed limits based on traffic for that reason.
|
| https://www.astra.admin.ch/astra/de/home/themen/nationalstr
| a...
| duxup wrote:
| Yeah I would think you'd also have to organize warning /
| preventing unusual oversized loads from showing up and ... oh
| noes they don't fit.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| What're incentives for state to care about traffic? In my city
| they'd close road, do nothing for a month, then quickly patch in
| a few days and open road. They don't care about traffic jams and
| badly patched road requires repair every few years, which is a
| good thing for repair company, they always got a lot of work.
|
| 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.
| pixl97 wrote:
| 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.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| We don't vote for our city officials, they got assigned from
| above. I guess that might be one reason.
| ajcp wrote:
| You vote for those who assigned them; kick em out.
| folli wrote:
| This is in Switzerland, where the incentives for the government
| are usually a bit more efficiently aligned with the citizen's
| wishes.
| sschueller wrote:
| The government decided to dig a third tunnel in one case
| because they calculated the economic damage would be greater if
| they had to close one tunnel for several years than digging the
| 3rd. Also this 3rd tunnel will not be used after construction
| other than for emergency evacuation. The 3rd tunnel was only
| approved under condition that capacity will not be increased.
| neilv wrote:
| "Fascinating process. I wish they had a gift shop that could ship
| me a momento."
|
| "Ja, natuerlich. Das Effizientestrassenerneuerungkasten."
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymyIEGRw4-U&t=4m7s
| ByThyGrace wrote:
| I saw that and wondered if they were samples for analysis (of
| what? in cardboard boxes??).
| phyzome wrote:
| It's for quality assurance. You take samples of asphalt (in
| this case), concrete, etc. during construction and they get
| shipped off for analysis. I don't know what they do with the
| asphalt, but for concrete they do slump tests of the wet
| concrete and crush tests of cured samples. Probably other
| tests too.
|
| 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!
| poonia wrote:
| bangalore desperately needs this to fulfill BBMP's very frequent
| road-digging adventures.
| astro- wrote:
| Very cool! But imagine having a rough day and accidentally
| running one of the heavy machines into the supporting pillar. It
| looks pretty tight under there.
| adamtaylor_13 wrote:
| The American mind cannot comprehend...
|
| (I know mine sure can't)
| FloatArtifact wrote:
| Is it my imagination or does it look like some of that equipment
| must be specialized for such a small environment?
| mb7733 wrote:
| Very cool. Reminds me of this video I saw recently about the new
| subway being dug in Vancouver. There they build a temporary road
| surface above the underground work:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4YFFtTEUQc&t=380s (I linked to
| the most relevant part, but the coolest part of this video is
| probably the machine that bores and reinforces the tunnel in one
| pass.)
| bombcar wrote:
| Road Guy Rob had a livestream near a temporary overpass
| https://www.youtube.com/live/yjKbN8CH1-k
| cryptonector wrote:
| Ok, this needs to be a thing everywhere.
| dottjt wrote:
| This is incredibly smart.
|
| 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.
| jmbwell wrote:
| I've seen this in Texas, notably on I-35 through Austin and on
| I-10 east out near the state line. In sequence, single-file, all
| the machines needed to do the job, from milling the surface at
| the front to laying down the new blacktop, rolling it, and IIRC
| painting it. Just creeping up the highway. Pilot vehicles at the
| front and back to close/open the lane.
|
| 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.
| aschla wrote:
| I'd love to see one of these on each end of the arterial 4-lane
| streets of Chicago. When spring hits, fire them up and go from
| one end to the other in either direction. Potholes become a thing
| of the past.
|
| We're already used to overhead infrastructure with the L all over
| the city.
| superphil0 wrote:
| Invented in Austria in 1999 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly-
| over
| doctorhandshake wrote:
| Beyond the bridge, the thing that has me stunned here is the
| precision and cleanliness of the job site. Being from the north
| east of USA, I am used to seeing road construction sites in
| permanent disarray - materials everywhere, rough interfaces
| between work site and untouched road, filthy machines, trucks,
| uniforms, and tool, etc. Is this just pristine because it's for a
| promo video or is this the norm in some places?
| ndr wrote:
| It's stereotypically Swiss.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| Probably a lot different when you are working under a bridge
| with cars whizzing about your head. There is not a lot of
| margin for error or an abundance of space to leave extra
| equipment.
| MrOrelliOReilly wrote:
| As a someone born and raised in the Northeast now living in
| Switzerland I can confirm that the cleanliness, orderliness and
| array of machinery is indeed typical in Switzerland :D But
| don't let this bridge promo fool you, you're just as likely to
| deal with roads closed to construction as anywhere else... the
| cost of well functioning infrastructure is that they always
| seem to be working on it!
| dark-star wrote:
| I bet they cannot set up that bridge without "stopping traffic
| completely". It needs to be built or at least moved to the target
| spot, during that time, traffic needs to be stopped.
|
| 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
| duxup wrote:
| It's like every redundancy type system I have seen, either for
| data storage, or network traffic, or applications. Yes, it does
| prevent a thing or helps to protect from it, very true from
| that point of view.
|
| 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 ;)
| fransje26 wrote:
| Not stopped. The traffic would be rerouted to the opposite
| lanes.
|
| It's obviously safer to have one-directional traffic than bi-
| directional traffic, so the bridge makes sense. The throughput
| is also higher.
| Nathanael_M wrote:
| Does anyone know of any good reading material / papers on
| effective road maintenance and construction? Asphalt quality,
| longevity, cost, processes, success stories, etc. Cold weather
| climates would be a bonus.
| boneitis wrote:
| Not really what you're asking for, but Sacramento's "Fix 50"[0]
| project is a currently ongoing development project where I can
| offer some commentary as a citizen who has no knowledge or
| expertise in this field.
|
| 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.
|
| [0]: https://www.fix50.com/
|
| [1]: https://archive.ph/8vmzu
| gibsonf1 wrote:
| That looks insanely expensive.
| resters wrote:
| Is there a futures market where I can bet that this will not be
| utilized in the United States in the next 20 years?
| simple10 wrote:
| Amazing! Thanks for sharing! This literally made my day.
| Triggered all sorts of happy dork in me. I had no idea this kind
| of construction was anything but pure sci-fi.
| dluan wrote:
| Road-that-becomes-road has now joined bridge-truck-that-becomes-
| bridge on my list of awesome and recursive construction widgets.
| rdevsrex wrote:
| Schaffe, Schaffe, highway baue?
| goeiedaggoeie wrote:
| It is such a flat road and relatively straight. There are lots,
| but ultimately limited use cases, compared to where busy roads go
| out there in the real world.
|
| I also think every one of those workers under that bridge should
| be wearing some type of respiratory filter for their long term
| health.
| jesstaa wrote:
| I guess if you feel like you're not wasting enough money on roads
| this would certainly be a way to waste a lot more.
| derelicta wrote:
| I assumed it was very normal. But according to this comment
| section, it isnt. lol
| fnord77 wrote:
| Why can't we just build roads that last?
| hollywood_court wrote:
| The city planners here in Auburn should probably watch this.
|
| 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.
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