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That's our stimulus money hard at work. If they finish the jobs too soon these temporary positions would be gone thus increasing the unemployment rate making our government look foolish.
Money is one reason and resource availability is another.
An example of this being that ST Wooten Corp is responsible for the paving going down on I-40 right now. That's a lot of asphalt. There's only so much of it to go around so production is tied up.
Other projects in the area where you see them grind the roadway down and then "disappear" for a while before repaving, this is the reason. The contractors aren't doing this on purpose. They have to wait until they can get their orders filled. It's often a waiting game. So the roads get ground down in advance so that when it's available, it can be used.
The main reason is because the DOT sets out a schedule for each project, then takes bids. They are generally required to take the lowest responsible bidder (they can throw out bids for cause or just throw them all out and rebid).
To prepare their bids, each company takes a look at their manpower, equipment availablity and the construction schedule and any bonus and damages that may be in the contract. Then they figure out what they think is the most cost effective solution. They could double up labor, but often, with road work, there are dependencies that are not that obvious and adding more labor just increases costs. If it was your potential profit going to waste, why dedicate extra labor and money when you still have plenty of time to do the project?
Now, if the DOT wants to add early completion bonuses in, that could speed things up, but potentially raise the cost. Also, they could cut the schedule in half to begin with, but that also may increase costs, because there are almost always late completion damages in the contract and if contractors do not think it is a reasonable schedule, they will allow for a certain amount of penalty payments in their bids.
Now, not to say, there are not times when the DMV makes contractors do things one way when another way might be faster and not to say that contractors don't sometimes lollygag a little, as a contractor I sometimes wonder why things are done the way they are too and lord knows I will not hesitate to criticise some desing decisions made by DOT (like multiple places having one lane in one direction and two lanes in teh other), but most of the time, people are doing what they can to try to get the job done. Even teh DOT will listen sometimes as they revised the scheduling of the current I40 project through Cary to a longer duration, but with the conveyor systems, the contractor proposed, they cut down lane closures to a small percentage of what was originally proposed.
Up in Michigan, they like to do a project, create a detour, and then do construction on that detour. Two seasons up here, winter and road construction.
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