Construction
Yesterday we were driving home from my parents house in Ogden. We could see driving up that the traffic going the other direction was bad, but it seemed the worst right around my parents house. You can see the freeway from the house (they live up on the hill) and it looked pretty good, so we decided to risk it rather than go the long way around. Well traffic was pretty good, so good that we figured whatever it was must have been past. Not so... It had just somehow moved much farther south. Other than the time a couple of weeks ago where we weren't moving at all (but were fortunately very close to the front) this was the worst traffic jam I'd ever been in.
As bad as it was I figured that the freeway eventually had to drop down to a single lane. And I kept waiting for the lanes to closed but we drove forever without losing a lane, expecting to finally see what was causing the problems around every corner. Finally after being stuck going 5 miles an hour for about 45 minutes we arrived at the problem. It was a hole. An incredibly large hole by the standards of potholes, but quite small by the standards of construction. I wanna say it was about a 15 foot square, and it basically just took up the middle lane. There was quite a bit of construction equipment in the area, so it was obviously part of some ongoing work, though there were no workmen around. Farther down the freeway there was some more construction and at that site there were actually some people working.
So here's what really annoys me. It seems that with something that small that they could have figured out some way to let people drive over it. Something that would have taken a fraction of the time that people wasted being stuck in traffic having to drive around it. Now I realize that comparing man-hours spent on construction vs. man hours wasted driving around constructions is often pointless, but in this particular case the scale of the comparison seems so egregious that I positive something could have been done... If 10,000 people (and that's really on the low side) wasted the same amount of time we did that's 7,500 hours. Even if you assume an outrageous conversion factor of 100 to 1 (that it's worth paying the construction people for an hour if it can save 100 hours for a commuter). That's 75 hours which basically means a 10 man crew working an entire day. But looking at it, I doubt it would have taken even that much. Ridiculous...
As you might be able to tell I'm still mad
As bad as it was I figured that the freeway eventually had to drop down to a single lane. And I kept waiting for the lanes to closed but we drove forever without losing a lane, expecting to finally see what was causing the problems around every corner. Finally after being stuck going 5 miles an hour for about 45 minutes we arrived at the problem. It was a hole. An incredibly large hole by the standards of potholes, but quite small by the standards of construction. I wanna say it was about a 15 foot square, and it basically just took up the middle lane. There was quite a bit of construction equipment in the area, so it was obviously part of some ongoing work, though there were no workmen around. Farther down the freeway there was some more construction and at that site there were actually some people working.
So here's what really annoys me. It seems that with something that small that they could have figured out some way to let people drive over it. Something that would have taken a fraction of the time that people wasted being stuck in traffic having to drive around it. Now I realize that comparing man-hours spent on construction vs. man hours wasted driving around constructions is often pointless, but in this particular case the scale of the comparison seems so egregious that I positive something could have been done... If 10,000 people (and that's really on the low side) wasted the same amount of time we did that's 7,500 hours. Even if you assume an outrageous conversion factor of 100 to 1 (that it's worth paying the construction people for an hour if it can save 100 hours for a commuter). That's 75 hours which basically means a 10 man crew working an entire day. But looking at it, I doubt it would have taken even that much. Ridiculous...
As you might be able to tell I'm still mad
posted by DireKobold at 2:23 PM
1 Comments:
Probably can't fill it in until it is explained to the higher-ups, meaning leaving it as is until the investigation is done ..
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