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Urban Highway Phased Construction
Class 10 - Session 4 continued



During the off-peak hours, this roadway can be closed. It's been closed here by some barrels. And these are contractors' vehicles used to support the construction. What you're looking at here are insulated blankets. This is the winter and you want to preserve the subgrade and prevent any frost in the subgrade. You then wait for a promising day of weather and, during that day, you can place the concrete cover the concrete with insulated blankets. That's how you can keep the work moving during the winter months.

In this photo, two lanes of new pavement have been completed and the barrier that separated those two phases has been removed. The chute has been eliminated to everyone's relief. The chute configuration is something to be used only when there is absolutely no alternative. This photo was taken during the day, during off-peak hours, so that the public occupies two lanes, and the newly constructed lanes are available for contractor's access. During peak hours, one or both of them will be restored to the public, so that there will always be three lanes of traffic for the public.


In this view, you can see how the next workspace has been developed. There are two new permanent lanes on this side and then the work zone and one passable lane on this side. There's room for three lanes for the public, but this photo was taken during daytime off-peak hours, so that this lane, which would normally be occupied by the public, is in this case, occupied by one of the contractor's vehicles.

That flexibility to close one of the three travel lanes during off-peak hours really was a great help to facilitating the construction. Otherwise, construction really would have been confined to the night and during the winter, especially, you want to be able to work during the day when it's a little warmer, when you can place concrete.

This is a summary view so that you can see how much time is consumed by these various stages. They actually moved along quite well. The very first stage, only one lane was available, and that was a concreted and placed in service. And that gave rise to this condition here in the center, where there was a chute.

In the final configuration, the two new lanes are available for traffic. During the off-peak hours, they are used in this configuration. The public is kept here in two lanes. This space is available to service the next construction area. It took about three months to get from one stage to the next, which I think is excellent progress - considering that there was utility work that also had to be done, in addition to placing concrete during the very cold weather.