Curious about road crews? What exactly do they do? 🚧👷♂️ When passing road work, have you noticed one or two guys working while others stand around? 🤔 Let’s uncover the mystery behind road crews! #RoadCrews #ConstructionWorkers #RoadWork #Infrastructure #CuriousMinds
What Road Crews Do:
– Road crews are responsible for maintaining and improving roads, bridges, and highways.
– Tasks include repairing potholes, patching cracks, resurfacing roads, and fixing infrastructure.
– Crew members may operate heavy machinery, use tools like shovels and jackhammers, and direct traffic.
Why Some Members Stand Around:
– Not all crew members may be needed for every task at a worksite.
– Some may be supervising, providing support, or coordinating operations behind the scenes.
– Safety regulations often require a certain number of workers present during road work.
Conclusion:
– Road crews play a vital role in maintaining our roads and infrastructure.
– Next time you pass road work, you’ll have a better understanding of the different roles within a crew!
– Stay curious, stay informed. #InfrastructureMaintenance #RoadSafety #Curiosity
There are typically just as many inspectors as there are workers on highway jobs.
They work on the roads. They don’t get fixed by magic.
They’re compiling data
believe it or not, the old joke of 1 guy working, 5 standing around is “sorta” right. depends on the job, if there is a confined space entry below 5ft in the ground you need like 3 ppl just to monitor air quality, be competent to direct them, then someone keeping an eye on those 2-3, you have to have fire station notified and on standby, then ppl watching traffic, called MOT, which is all road signs, flaggers etc. For above ground it is much of the same, what you see standing around is ppl actually doin shit, BUT, they are just standing around so they multitask chillin.
There are only so many tools.
That or someone got there job done first, such as finish mixing cement and now waiting on the other guys to finish their job in digging.
Might be the end part where everyone is just about done on the project and waiting for the last person.
They’re effectively wasting the tax money by doing nothing
A few things are at play:
– There’s only so much space to work. Maybe two guys can get in there and dig, not the rest of the crew.
– Labour like digging takes a lot of energy. You only see two people digging as you drive by; you don’t seem the swapping in and out every now and then.
– Not everyone on the site is a manual labourer. Some of them are inspectors, or there to use a specific machine at a specific point in time. They just have to wait for their moment.
Ground guides maybe. Or they’re waiting for something to be finished in order to do their job
They are all lazy. If they actually did any work, our roads would actually be drivable. Imagine if anyone else tried to do what they do in other jobs. Immediately fired. Not these losers though they get paid to stand and do nothing.
The others are “ready to work” so our council has told us trying to justify it.
Likely part of different teams or on standby for when the job calls for more hands.
A lot of construction(roads specifically) are done in phases with a time limit in between. So while one crew is stripping the old road, another comes behind and lays framework, another comes through with asphalt, then the line painters, etc.
There’s a show called Refined on YouTube if you want to get into the mind of a maintenance man.
I supervise excavation crews and this logic always cracks me up. Each worker that you see on-site typically has a specific job. Not all construction workers are labourers.
Next time you pass road crews stop for a bit and you should notice a change in workflow and workers alternating tasks depending on the type work being conducted.
Two reasons: Firstly, it takes a lot of different workers to do something basic, and it has a specific order.
Say there’s a section of road that needs to be milled so it can be resurfaced. Firstly, you need a traffic control crew to close off that section of road and handle changed traffic conditions (either with stop/slow, merging multiple lanes into one, detours.) They need people to rotate in with them so they don’t get fatigued. Road speed high enough? You’ll have more in TMAs to help with that shutdown.
You get the cold planer in, they need one person to operate and one or two to keep an eye on the ground, make sure that they don’t accidentally tear up a pit lid or drain while they’re milling. That’ll need a low loader trailer to get to site, so add at least one of those. Might throw a bobcat or two in there, get the little parts you don’t want to risk with a big milling machine.
We can’t dump the old road material on the ground, so gotta have the dump trucks on standby to pick it up, and have a street sweeper to clean up anything that’s missed. Need more traffic controllers to back them up, make sure they don’t run anything over and make sure nothing enters the site and runs someone over. Planer taking a decent amount of the road? Need a crew to make a ramp from the planed road to the old road, make sure we don’t break anyone’s suspension. If the road had line markings, that needs to be painted back on to avoid causing confusion.
Want to check in that drain from before, make sure it’s looking alright? Need one in the drain and two up top, because it’s a confined space. Working on a bridge? Might have an engineer to look at the material after the planer, make sure it’s looking fine.
Secondly? You’re out on the road, within metres of traffic that weighs a lot more than you do, and is travelling a lot faster than you. Some of those crews job is just to keep their eyes on that traffic, because it takes one locked brake, one glance at the phone, one quick power nap, and suddenly a car is barreling right at a work crew. If someone sees it? They’ve got time to run. With no one looking out for it, you don’t know somethings gone wrong till it’s too late.
Coming from a union laborer, a majority of the time there isn’t enough space to all work at the same time. And as mentioned above, people take turns with digging, tamping, etc to give others a break. Not to mention if a machine is at work, you can’t really stand in the way while it’s doing its thing
Think about something simple like repairing a pothole. You saw a square out of the road, a few people break up the asphalt and remove it, someone checks whether gravel needs to be added and tamped down so you don’t have to fix an even bigger hole tomorrow, meanwhile the guys making sure the asphalt is hot enough to be dumped or shoveled are making sure it’s ready, the hole is filled, and the guy driving the steamroller who has been patiently waiting hops in and flattens it.
People have to wait for their job, and once it’s done, they wait for the rest of the crew to do theirs. If things are done out of order, the job doesn’t get done properly or efficiently, and people get hurt.
Lots of good answers in here already, but I’ll add to it from an oversight angle.
Unions. Labor unions dig, pave, tamp, etc. Welding unions weld. Electrical unions run the wire.
If it were staggered to maximize the output from the labor needed, it would probably be cheaper. It wouldn’t be faster. This is not a perfect process. There is at least one site manager and one inspector.
Supervising
This doesn’t exactly answer your question, but if you’ve ever wondered why a particular road project seems to take *forever* and that both iris happening despite the workers being out there all the time, the answer is probably….
Soil compacting!
It takes a *long time* and a *lot* of full dirt plus lime, salt, cement aggregate, etc. to correctly and completely compact the soil to support a road bed. And it can only be compacted about 18” at a time, so multiple layers need to be done one at a time, each of which requires materials from a few different sources, mixing, sampling, approving the samples, spreading, compacting, then repeating. And some of those guys standing around are monitoring every step of the process to ensure that corners aren’t cut, quality control standards, safety measures, and building codes are being met.
Job security is the words
You say this like it’s a phenomenon that isn’t also present in the majority of corporate offices. I’ve had lots of workplaces where people were far more proactive working from home, but I was irritated in the office bc the cubicles didn’t muffle the conversations happening all around me, 80% of the day.