The city is resurfacing the street in front of my house and the course of the project to date may go some way to explaining why infrastructure projects don’t produce as many jobs as the proponents of fiscal stimulus projects might expect.
It’s been fifteen years or more since our street has received serious attention and the neighbors have been complaining to the alderman’s office for years about its condition. I don’t live on a main thoroughfare but, rather, a side street within a block or so of two major drags. During rush hour we get a flurry of traffic from frustrated motorists avoiding the crush on the main streets in addition to the regular neighborhood traffic of cars and delivery trucks.
Shortly after our street was resurfaced last time the city with its conventional exquisite timing elected to replace all of our storm drains intended to control the flow of water into the storm sewers. The roads were torn up again, the new drains installed, and the once neatly repaved street was patched haphazardly. I don’t think the drains had much effect and if a civil engineer had taken a look at our neighborhood he could have predicted that. I suspect no engineer was involved in the project. If a professional engineer was involved he should have been sued for malpractice—you can’t approve a project without a site inspection and none was ever one, at least not here.
At any rate a week or so ago signs started going up along our street warning us that we couldn’t park on the street from 6:00am to 3:30pm from the 15th through the 19th, all week. Midmorning on the 15th a crew and heavy equipment arrived, stripped the surface of the street, and left. That was the last we saw of anybody until today.
Yesterday our signs were replaced with new ones advising us that that project had been extended through the end of next week. Today a crew arrived to put up sawhorses, tear out the old storm drains, and install new ones. That took them a little over an hour. Then the second crew left.
I’m guessing that we won’t see any more action until next week.
At no time have we seen a city employee—this project is subcontracted out and each crew appears to work for a different company. The entire project is probably less than two days’ work. Why is taking so long?
The answer may be a mystery when viewed from afar but is obvious to anyone who’s dealt with the city. Anything other than minor road repair is subcontracted. There is an approved list of vendors (my company used to be an approved vendor for the city of Chicago). Contracts only go to approved companies.
The companies on that list have greater incentives to space projects out so they can execute with existing capacity than to add capacity so they can execute them faster. Additionally, there is no downside to letting the various crews execute their portion of the task when time allows rather than on a tight schedule.
As a consequence a lot of city infrastructure projects can be executed at a glacial pace by small crews run by a relatively small number of companies.
I hear you. My wife lives on a street in DC’s Georgetown. It’s a cobblestone street, with a pair of trolley tracks running down the center. Under the tracks is a major conduit for the trolley power system into which gas, water, and electric lines have been run.
The conduit has been collapsing since the last trolley ran along it, sometime in 1962. As a result, there are enormous potholes–axle-breakers–and the ends of track sections tend to rise, rise sufficiently to burst a tire if hit at the wrong angle.
Over ten years ago, it was decided that the street needed major repair, not just patching. It took the better part of a decade to get agreementOnce the decision was made, a certain ‘preservationist’ took it to court, where it shimmered like jelly for better than six years. Finally, the courts decided that his ideas of preservation weren’t worth it. The tracks would be removed, but the cobblestones would be reinstalled after repairs.
The city announced that repair would start in 2009. It started this spring, with various utility companies coming out at odd intervals to do their thing. All the city has done so far is to post no parking signs and tow away offending vehicles.
Residents expect repairs may be done by the summer of 2012, but no one is willing to bet.
Our local ARRA project replaced the curb corners at several intersections with ramps. Overall it seemed to go pretty well – working one section at a time, a crew came in and removed the old curb and prepped for concrete . The next day they poured the concrete and two days after that they removed the forms and cleaned up.