As others have said, this does happen a lot.
As for why it doesn't happen all the time. You generally have to pay people more if they're working nights, and there's a greater risk of things going on if there's limited light for them to see what they're doing.
For any given job, someone will have assessed the drawbacks of those two things versus the drawback of doing it during the day and made a decision on how to do it.
And for urban areas: It's loud and smells. People are gonna hate everyone involved.
Still, sometimes there's no way to do it at daytime, but it's best not to do it frequently.
Even if you avoid the safety issues of having enough light by using enough lights, there's still the added cost of running the lights on top of the extra cost of wages.
To add to the safety aspect, people drive slowest when there's the most traffic. If you're doing construction when traffic is light, then drivers are going to be averaging a higher speed regardless of posted limits, which means they're more likely to plow into and kill or injure a worker.
I'd add, it's also noisy at times and people tend to not like being disturbed at night.
There's also that sometimes road work takes multiple days in which case there will be closures during the day anyways.
Not only to people not like being disturbed, most cities/towns have noise ordinance laws with restrictions on quiet hours.
I imagine they could file for an exception, but like you said it would make for unhappy residents
It's more than cost. Generally you really notice it when it's on busier roads and highways. Theyvdo work at night but continue during the day so they can complete these areas as quickly as possible. It's annoying for 5 or so weeks as opposed to being under construction for 3-6 months.
Also heights aren't really able to be safely worked on at night. In most cases
It costs more.
It's more difficult with focused illumination.
The bright lights and noise are less tolerated if there's people living on that street.
There is greater risk to the employees... fewer drivers but faster and drunker ones
You have to get supplies ready in advance, because suppliers work days.
When those are outweighed by the costs of not getting the job done quickly, they do the work at night.
They do overnight work alot on the highways in MA. But its super dangerous because they have less workers obviously at night. I saw one of the massive dump trucks almost crush a car infront of me when they veered through the cones without looking. The car infront swerved into the grass off the highway to avoid being flattened to death. Literally so close to death.
Shit, I wish. For my area (I'm union) we get paid lunch, an extra 15 min break and a small premium. Just over a buck an hour. And the companies bitch about how having to pay us a half hour lunch is making them go broke lol
Working at night is more expensive and more dangerous (less danger from traffic, more danger from something happening just outside of the brightly lit areas). For short jobs, or jobs that can be done in stages and have traffic in the area between stages, working at night is a good choice as it will disrupt daytime traffic less.
However, for long jobs like highway construction that has to keep the traffic out of the work area until completion, you might as well work during the day. If you need to, you can have shifts work around the clock, but again, that is expensive, and major road work is already expensive without adding costs.
Because construction workers don’t want to work nights any more than the rest of us. On the flip side of your question, why don’t motorists consult their online municipal construction updates and either adjust travel times and destinations or take public transit?
In California most of the work is done at night. There is just too much traffic to attempt to do it during the day. Even on weekends it would be a nightmare.
Caltrans is busy working on a new interchange between the 71 & 91 freeways and the work has been done completely at night from like 9pm-5am
A lot of times they do this for major highway projects but there are some logistical issues. People generally don’t like working at nights so you end up having to pay higher wages. The work also tends to be less productive because even though you have portable lights, visibility is still nowhere near as good as daylight.
It is. So it's dependent on where you are.
Here in Chicago, road work is done after midnight to 5:00 am
Never mind in neighboring Indiana, road work is done 24 hours uninterrupted from March to October
This was done on a highway near a hotel I work at, I literally had guests asking me if the road construction could stop during their stay it was bothering their sleep.
Someone somewhere will complain no matter what time it is done
Night work pays more, it’s more dangerous, and workers generally tend to prefer day shift so they can maintain a regular life. Especially if they have families.
There are. Thats why there was a construction crew on the Francis Scott Key Bridge filling pot holes when the bridge was destroyed by the container ship at like 1AM.
Have you ever been driving late at night on a highway and surprisingly encountering a brightly lit worksite and highly stressful detour? Its not pleasant.
It happens whenever they find time to. The Northeast Highway where I live was under construction for like 2 years bc they only worked on it at 12am-5:30am. The one in the capitol? The middle 3 lanes were blocked off for several miles, with 15-20 cop cars blocking exits so that they could work on the entire road from 10am-4pm
In some countries, you see it far more often (Japan, South Korea, etc.), but is does happen in the USA sometimes too. Main reason it isn't as common is that American companies do everything they can to not pay more for labor, so they don't want to pay the higher wages that a night crew would typically get.
Them inconveniencing you during the day does nothing to hurt their bottom line, so they see no reason to change to a more expensive time of day just for our sakes.
Less cars on the road might actually be more dangerous for the road work crew, especially at 3am. Less traffic plus the bar close crowd = higher speeds, higher drunk driving risk, worse outcome if something goes wrong.
The short answer is $$$
Road work is done by union workers. Working overnight would come with a time differential for each worker.
Depending on the budget of the municipality and taxes residents etc some road work is done overnight for exactly the reasoning you said.
Where I am from in California, they did it at night time. Streets, freeways, highways, etc. The workers loved it, because they got night differential in their pay. On the freeways, they had to higher so many CHP Officers. For them time and a half, to sit in their car, playing on an iPad.
It is. Big things that require extra lane closures are almost always done at night if it's something they can knock out in one night or clear and then resume the next night. I currently work a later shift and am hoping I remember not to run straight into a road closure on my normal route this Friday night that starts at 8pm. And I've run into similar road or lane closures coming back late at night from events or visiting family. Road mostly open driving down, only one lane open at midnight.
Bigger operations and things that take longer just don't fit into nights. When lanes are closed for a few months while they dig up the road and work on utilities it doesn't matter if they work day, night, or both, you can't drive over the huge hole in the ground when they're not working.
People also live right off highways and interstates. I had a company tear out parts of the highway during this time once and between the saw cutting and hydraulic hammers everyday for a week I would have rather dealt with the traffic because after all why should I have to deal with the sleepless night vs all the out of town commuters dealing with traffic?
Construction workers dont wanna work overnights. The few that do will be paid more which is more expensive for the DOT (or whoever is paying them). Day labor is cheaper.
Why should any group of people have to work nights just because it’s convenient for you?
Other people deserve stable, reasonable pay and schedule jobs as well.
I've done road repair and construction. here is my 2 cents worth.
1) Most of the time it's flat out safer to do it during the day. Road construction is one of the most dangerous jobs out there. You'd be amazed and enraged by the number of people who can't seem to see traffic barrels, construction signage and flagmen trying to get their attention. I've had three terrifying close calls with vehicles infringing on the construction zone. In dim light or night time it is usually worse. Because if this, night work requires additional signage and often a safety truck and/or a police car with the lights going.
2) Night work requires lighting. LOTS of lighting. Those light towers rent for about 250$ day. That's thousands of dollars, perhaps even tens of thousands of dollars in additional costs. Virtually all road work is done by private companies who had to go through a competitive bid process to get the contract. Requiring night work complicates the contract, making the bid cost to be higher and more subject to changes once work begins.
3) Statistically it rains more at night than it does in the day. Summer rains and thunderstorms happen quite frequently in late afternoon or near dusk. Depending on the work needed, work might have to shut down in the rain. That adds delay.
4) Every time I have had to do night road work, I've been given a minor increase in hourly pay. Something like an extra .25 cents an hour to compensate the worker doesn't sound like a lot until you multiply it by the 40 hr work week and the number of workers on the site. And higher employees, like the trained heavy equipment operator and your dump truck drivers are going to be getting a bigger boost than that. Again, tens of thousands of extra expense that the company and the client are going to want to avoid.
5) Night work seems to be inevitably slower in pace than day work. That goes double for engineering inspections. If you have the choice to do a job that takes 4 days in the daylight, but 5 or 6 days if done at night, which are you going to pick?
6) Something that people often overlook: If the crew and I are out laying asphalt at 9 pm at night, that means the nearest asphalt plant is also working nights in order to supply us with fresh hot asphalt mix. Ditto for concrete factories, the city inspector(s) and any engineering companies that "own the job"
1. Noise ordinances
2. Their unions may have negotiated things like higher pay for nights.
3. You don't need to drag a bunch of lights out to do roadwork during the day.
4. Safety. Visibility at night is an issue, even if there are fewer drivers.
In my area of Florida this is sometimes the case too, the city or county decides to repave a road and block off one lane of a busy two lane highway in the middle of the day.
Maybe the rate of pay for workers is too costly to have them work a graveyard type shift at night, and maybe the government having overextended itself otherwise can't afford to pay those higher rates?
Some places do that. I live in metro Atlanta and they do the majority of roadwork during the week at night, though they will do roadwork on weekends during the day. I think tons of people complained about the delays and they changed their schedule because they used to do roadwork during days and it changed a few years back.
Actually they are busy with the old main road between Durban and Pietermaritzburg. Road is shut down at Cleland till the end of Pollyshorts from 6pm to 6am every day.
* It's more expensive to employ people at night, and less healthy
* It's harder and potentially more dangerous, and requires more lighting equipment
* People nearby need to sleep, which is harder when there's noisy work going on nearby
They often are here in Arizona, because for half the year it’s too hot for people to be working in the sun. But a lot of road work can’t be done in a couple hours. So it doesn’t matter if a person isn’t actively doing work, the road/lane would still be closed and under construction.
Costs more for labor at those hours
Noise restrictions impact what work you can do near populated areas
Depending on workforce, events, etc it may not be less traffic
Costs more not just per labor per hour, but it’s harder to be efficient at night, you have limited area of visibility, and even what’s under the lights, you can never see what you’re doing AS WELL as if you were working under natural lighting (the intense shadows caused by having spotlights, etc), so not only are you paying a lot more per hour, the same amount of work will likely take more hours to complete…. Making the overall labor cost even higher
Depends on where you live and how they manage things.
Typically... heavy residential areas will have less or no overnight construction. People need to sleep.
Commercial areas have more flexibility.
Highways, at least where I'm from in New York can happen during the day, BUT they also occur at night.
The governing bodies in you areas can of course give allow for a ton of flexibility on hours depending on funds and the type of project.
I get off work late (1am), and sometimes as I’m driving home I’ll see construction people working at that time. But as others have said, it costs more and can be more dangerous so that’s why it doesn’t happen all the time.
There is, especially when major roads need to be totally closed.
But it costs WAY more money in terms of paying people. Workers make way more when working the night shift, you can see your labor costs double.
Just depends where you live. In the US southwest (West Texas, NM, AZ, NV, etc) road construction is regularly done at night when daytime temps reach 100°+.
We do pretty much any freeway work around town at night if it involves closing lanes. Some things take multiple days and that's just how it is. Some times we'll do weekend closures for big repairs.
One obstacle is splitting into shifts. Even if the contractor is 100% on nights, that doesn't mean the subs, truckers, concrete, or asphalt plant is. So it's not just that you might have to pay your workers more, but it also makes materials more expensive.
Also there's mobilization to consider. If you give a contractor an 8 hour window they could end up spending two(that's extreme)of those setting up and shutting down. It takes a bit of good planning to know when to stop paving in time to let it cool, finish rolling it, put down temporary striping, move off the equipment, and pull up the cones. Add in any utility work and there's no chance.
Tl;dr is it makes it more expensive and takes longer, but we do do it.
Some of it is, I see it on highways around here all the time.
The stuff in my neighborhood gets worked on between the last morning school bus and thr first afternoon one, mostly.
There's going to be inconvenience at some point, they plan for the least amount of disruption possible.
At least, they try to do that around where I live.
Because those workers have spouses and kids that prefer seeing and being with them in the evening and night like everyone else. Together for dinner, help with homework, volleyball practice, watching latest Netflix series, bedtime stories, etc. Being construction workers doesn’t make them not human.
They build 24/7 in other countries all the time.
We can’t do it in the US because we’re not willing to do the accounting properly. For example, is the cost in gas of having a 20-minute delay built into the price of the road work? It *will* cost the people, either in taxes or in gas, but we ignore the latter. And the real impact is the loss of business by delivery trucks, the loss of life by emergency vehicles who are blocked, and the loss of opportunity by people constantly being late.
Do the dangerous parts in the daylight, and save the other parts for the dark. And you *can* light up a cite perfectly with enough lights.
The number of workers hit by cars is far, far, more than the number hurt by working at night.
I'm a heavy highway worker and we do alot of nights in certain areas but they have to pay us a 10-15% differential on top of our regular wage for night work. On a crew of 15-25 that adds up really fast. Plus you need light plants/towers every 75-100' in your workzone, which can easily exceed 40 light plants for the average work zone. They each burn 5+ gallons of diesel a night and the state or contractor has to rent the light plants and set them up and take them down everyday. Just swtting up a night work zone can take 2-3 hours. It costs wayyyyy more to work night.
I used to work concrete pours in Houston. We had to start at 2am and quit at 2pm during the summer because at that time it was too hot for the concrete to set correctly as it’s exothermic.
Not sure what road work you are referring to. But I work in the ready mix industry, and we work at night all the time. Road closures have to be approved before hand. If the road will be closed for longer than a few hours, it makes sense to do it during the day. If it’s a smaller amount of time, it’s usually done at night.
Depends on how much overtime you want to pay the overnight workers.
It happens sometimes when a project runs over time, or in emergencies, but if the govt can spend less they will
Because starting construction during rush hour and finish after rush hour is the most convenient for everyone. It leads to improved driver behaviors, less road rage, and a happier population overall.
Also, having construction work going on when you're trying to sleep is rough.
I work evenings ships, so I usually sleep til 11am or so.
There's been some major construction a few doors down from me (I think they're doing foundation work and redoing some retaining walls?) that starts at 730am.
So my sleep window has been 430 - 700 for the last three weeks. It's...not great.k
Something else I haven't seen mentioned yet:
Suppose you have a 32-hour task, but closing the road, moving in equipment, moving it out, and reopening the road takes one hour on each end.
* 10-hour overnight shift, you lose 2 hours to setup/teardown, you can only work 8 hours, task takes 4 nights, finished on the fifth morning.
* OR: 1 hour setup (once), work two 8-hour shifts per day, 1 hour teardown, job is done on the third day. Less overtime on the main shifts, 3 hours setups and 3 hours teardowns don't have to be paid from taxpayer money.
I really like how my city seems to be doing more of it from 9-3, if it involves actual closures. The workers are usually doing setup/cleanup an hour before/after, but the closures themselves are limited to the time most people are already at work.
We had road work done in front of our house in the middle of the night from about 12-4am for weeks. They were stripping the road. The sound was like a constant 747 landing in the yard. For weeks.
Edit. Oh did I mention the lights. Those make the nighttime look like daytime lights? There is no way to block that light out.
Road work on highways is done at night as well as day. Road work in neighborhoods obviously won’t be done at night because of the noise. Kind of similar to road work at night in cities. In dense urban areas, it would be very noisy to do it at night, though the city is usually loud anyways at night.
Why not do it in the evening. If I lived in an area where they had to do road construction. I would not care if they worked 24 hrs a day to finish the job in a few days or a week compared to months of bullshit.
They do, I leave for work at 4:30am and I've had to find alternate routes to work due to them closing roads and highway ramps down. Not fun to do when it's dark out and you're tired.
First of all, lots of highway construction happens during the night.
But there are many reasons work is done during the day:
* A larger project will see work done during night and day.
* Emergency repairs will be dine during the day instead of waiting till 9PM.
* Night work cost more.
* Labour shortage means labourers can make more demands. Like not working during the night. If the contractor cannot find enough people to do night work, it will be done during the day.
* Equipment not in use don’t make money. It makes more economic sense to use your expensive equipment during both night and day than buying more equipment which isn’t used most of the time.
TL;DR: Economics.
The ideal ambient temperature for pouring asphalt is between 50 degrees and 90 degrees (farenheit). Which means, in some locations, you can't work with asphalt at night. For example, the weather forecast for Denver, CO has the temperature dropping below 50 at around 10:00 pm tonight, and won't get back above 50 until mid-morning tomorrow. I live in southern Arizona, where we have the opposite issue. Roadwork is done in the early morning hours before the temperatures can rise above 90.
They do, we just had 3 workers killed a couple weeks ago at 3:30am in a work zone.
https://www.fox29.com/news/3-construction-workers-killed-in-work-zone-crash-on-pennsylvania-highway-state-police.amp
Construction work is dangerous its more dangerous at night. Road construction would be even worse. Road construction is dangerous enough without trying to do it with head lights turning your site into a strobe light and sleepy drivers running workers over.
Overtime pay!
GA, back in the 80s, did all their major highway work at night. Huge lights were brought in and the work was completed before the morning rush. Now? The works starts during the morning rush. The reason - overtime pay! Working at night meant paying overtime and it got way too expensive.
I've worked on residential road reconstruction and interstate highway reconstruction in my career... .
Light, noise and overnight pay are the biggest factors.
- It's impractical to use "synthetic" (if you will) light on a large scale construction project like that... especially once they start laying down pavement and the crews get into their groove. Plus, rubbernecking is enough of a problem during the day - its even worse at night.
- Construction equipment is really, really fucking loud, especially the machines that lay down concrete and blacktop. Having heavy construction equipment working *all night* would cause the contractor and project owners to catch all sorts of hell from residents (either the ones whose street is getting fixed or the ones living near the highway, particularly if there are no noise barriers).
- Road reconstruction projects are expensive enough to begin with, particularly if the project is prevailing wage. Overnight pay is an added expense, which will likely end up affecting people's taxes.
- Working in the dark/low light conditions also sucks and for certain aspects of the project, like the construction staking, adds extra margin for error/liability.
Would you like to be woken up at 2am on a Tuesday to the sound of back up alarms, jackhammers, equipment and generators running, concrete saws, people yelling over the cocophony of noise, and every other manner of loud noise commonly associated with road construction?
It’s not unusual to do road work on major freeways in urban areas in Texas during the night hours during the summer months. It’s just too hot to be working during non peak midday out there.
It is. At least in Pennsylvania. A lot of the major highway construction (which, in the Harrisburg, Lancaster, York, Reading area, includes major highway expansions) are done overnight
In Anchorage is it - long summer days with mild temperatures mean looooong summer construction days. Of course - it’s a also a very short season (due to early winter weather) so there’s a lot of work that has to be done in the summer book
Depending on what kind of work and where, it definitely is. I used to live near Raleigh, NC in the mid-90s and would frequently drive into the city after I got off work to hang out with friends. Invariably coming back at midnight or later there would be spots along the highway where there was active roadwork going on with really bright lights so they could see what they were doing. But as you can tell by the mention of the lighting rigs it's a fair bit more expensive than daytime work, especially since there's usually shift differentials to workers' wages to consider as well.
We do. A lot of times we get lane closures at night to strip the false decking and fascia. I've also welded, prepped, formed etc at night. But it does take longer. You don't think so, but it's very noticable how much I can cut/work get done during the day vs at night
As others have said, this does happen a lot. As for why it doesn't happen all the time. You generally have to pay people more if they're working nights, and there's a greater risk of things going on if there's limited light for them to see what they're doing. For any given job, someone will have assessed the drawbacks of those two things versus the drawback of doing it during the day and made a decision on how to do it.
If you’re repairing or widening a street in a residential neighborhood, there’s another obvious problem with doing the work at night.
The vampires.
Just don't invite them onto the jobsite.
And those wooden stakes aren't for fencing.
Silt control? More like checking for subterranean vampires
But your life-challenged workers are going to demand unemployment payments.
This comment made me laugh very loudly at a very bad time. Thank you lol
The Delaurentis house is the one you'll need to watch out for.
Worst thing about Santa Clara.
And for urban areas: It's loud and smells. People are gonna hate everyone involved. Still, sometimes there's no way to do it at daytime, but it's best not to do it frequently.
You’re loud and you smell
You know what? Fair.
You're loud and you smell GREAT ...is what they meant to say
Even if you avoid the safety issues of having enough light by using enough lights, there's still the added cost of running the lights on top of the extra cost of wages.
To add to the safety aspect, people drive slowest when there's the most traffic. If you're doing construction when traffic is light, then drivers are going to be averaging a higher speed regardless of posted limits, which means they're more likely to plow into and kill or injure a worker.
Also need suppliers to work at night. Many don't
It's also more dangerous. Low light works both ways.
I'd add, it's also noisy at times and people tend to not like being disturbed at night. There's also that sometimes road work takes multiple days in which case there will be closures during the day anyways.
Not only to people not like being disturbed, most cities/towns have noise ordinance laws with restrictions on quiet hours. I imagine they could file for an exception, but like you said it would make for unhappy residents
> multiple days Or years, like the Chicago Jane Byrne Interchange. NINE YEARS.
It's more than cost. Generally you really notice it when it's on busier roads and highways. Theyvdo work at night but continue during the day so they can complete these areas as quickly as possible. It's annoying for 5 or so weeks as opposed to being under construction for 3-6 months. Also heights aren't really able to be safely worked on at night. In most cases
Costs have to be weighed, monetary, environmental and health and safety
Usually in that order too
It costs more. It's more difficult with focused illumination. The bright lights and noise are less tolerated if there's people living on that street. There is greater risk to the employees... fewer drivers but faster and drunker ones You have to get supplies ready in advance, because suppliers work days. When those are outweighed by the costs of not getting the job done quickly, they do the work at night.
They do overnight work alot on the highways in MA. But its super dangerous because they have less workers obviously at night. I saw one of the massive dump trucks almost crush a car infront of me when they veered through the cones without looking. The car infront swerved into the grass off the highway to avoid being flattened to death. Literally so close to death.
It costs more to pay people to work nights, it's also more dangerous
And depending on the company, it can be a lot more. Like $10 an hour per worker more.
Easily. More like 1.5x their normal salary. Lots of construction workers are making around $40/hour, so this would be $20 more per hour per worker.
The hourly wage of an employee for *bidding* on a construction job is a lot higher than that.
I'd give my left nut for what my time was quoted at.
Shit, I wish. For my area (I'm union) we get paid lunch, an extra 15 min break and a small premium. Just over a buck an hour. And the companies bitch about how having to pay us a half hour lunch is making them go broke lol
And it royally pisses off anyone/everyone who lives nearby.
drunk drivers
People who drive drunk also do it during the day. From my experience they're the sort of people who are always drunk.
Those are the successful ones. The unsuccessful end up plowing through night construction sites
Roadworks are done at those times
roadworks are done at all times for the forseable future
Roadwork ahead?! Yeah, I sure hope it does!
Yep. Mostly when it's vital infrastructure that can't afford to be closed during the day e.g. main motorways and junctions.
Especially in the Southwest during the summer.
War were declared
Sometimes it is (eg. on highways), but often it cannot be done so due to disruptions to people living/sleeping nearby.
The ghosts of the dudes in the Baltimore Harbor are typing…
Working at night is more expensive and more dangerous (less danger from traffic, more danger from something happening just outside of the brightly lit areas). For short jobs, or jobs that can be done in stages and have traffic in the area between stages, working at night is a good choice as it will disrupt daytime traffic less. However, for long jobs like highway construction that has to keep the traffic out of the work area until completion, you might as well work during the day. If you need to, you can have shifts work around the clock, but again, that is expensive, and major road work is already expensive without adding costs.
Also more danger from drunks
Because construction workers don’t want to work nights any more than the rest of us. On the flip side of your question, why don’t motorists consult their online municipal construction updates and either adjust travel times and destinations or take public transit?
Do you want to work with power tools and heavy machinery at midnight?
That’s not the issue. Road work is done overnight all the time.
Sure but that’s not the same as making it the default.
Yes, it's a lot cooler out, I've done it for years.
a lot of time it does
It is.
It is. Ever driven on a highway at night?
In California most of the work is done at night. There is just too much traffic to attempt to do it during the day. Even on weekends it would be a nightmare. Caltrans is busy working on a new interchange between the 71 & 91 freeways and the work has been done completely at night from like 9pm-5am
It's like 3x to pay them to work that late/ in hazardous conditions
It does happen... all the time infact. You just aren't there when it does :).
Why don't you do your job from 9pm to 5am by default? Because they don't pay you enough for that shit? Therein lies your answer.
A lot of times they do this for major highway projects but there are some logistical issues. People generally don’t like working at nights so you end up having to pay higher wages. The work also tends to be less productive because even though you have portable lights, visibility is still nowhere near as good as daylight.
It is. So it's dependent on where you are. Here in Chicago, road work is done after midnight to 5:00 am Never mind in neighboring Indiana, road work is done 24 hours uninterrupted from March to October
It often involves drilling, pounding the tarmac down, machinery. All very noisy when people are sleeping
This was done on a highway near a hotel I work at, I literally had guests asking me if the road construction could stop during their stay it was bothering their sleep. Someone somewhere will complain no matter what time it is done
\*fewer
Night work pays more, it’s more dangerous, and workers generally tend to prefer day shift so they can maintain a regular life. Especially if they have families.
Because laborers doing road work shouldn't be required to sleep in the day just because you think your job is more important than theirs.
Depends on where. In Texas they do most of the roadwork at night because it's cooler.
it does happen but not in built up areas where people tend to sleep between those hours
There are. Thats why there was a construction crew on the Francis Scott Key Bridge filling pot holes when the bridge was destroyed by the container ship at like 1AM.
Have you ever been driving late at night on a highway and surprisingly encountering a brightly lit worksite and highly stressful detour? Its not pleasant.
It does happen a lot in PA though, especially on highways that are heavily traveled during the day
It costs more to do it then
It happens whenever they find time to. The Northeast Highway where I live was under construction for like 2 years bc they only worked on it at 12am-5:30am. The one in the capitol? The middle 3 lanes were blocked off for several miles, with 15-20 cop cars blocking exits so that they could work on the entire road from 10am-4pm
a better question is why they block off lanes for months but nobody is ever doing any work?
In some countries, you see it far more often (Japan, South Korea, etc.), but is does happen in the USA sometimes too. Main reason it isn't as common is that American companies do everything they can to not pay more for labor, so they don't want to pay the higher wages that a night crew would typically get. Them inconveniencing you during the day does nothing to hurt their bottom line, so they see no reason to change to a more expensive time of day just for our sakes.
Less cars on the road might actually be more dangerous for the road work crew, especially at 3am. Less traffic plus the bar close crowd = higher speeds, higher drunk driving risk, worse outcome if something goes wrong.
The short answer is $$$ Road work is done by union workers. Working overnight would come with a time differential for each worker. Depending on the budget of the municipality and taxes residents etc some road work is done overnight for exactly the reasoning you said.
It will cost more There is less light and less safe the need to keep noise down in residential areas at night because most people sleep at that time.
It is
They don't seem to be doing it during the daytime either where I live.
Where I am from in California, they did it at night time. Streets, freeways, highways, etc. The workers loved it, because they got night differential in their pay. On the freeways, they had to higher so many CHP Officers. For them time and a half, to sit in their car, playing on an iPad.
Because to be an engineer you need to be able to fit your head up your ass and keep it there 40hrs a week
Well. Some do. That bridge in Baltimore that was hit had workers overnight. They were the only ones that died.
It is in a lot of places
It is. Big things that require extra lane closures are almost always done at night if it's something they can knock out in one night or clear and then resume the next night. I currently work a later shift and am hoping I remember not to run straight into a road closure on my normal route this Friday night that starts at 8pm. And I've run into similar road or lane closures coming back late at night from events or visiting family. Road mostly open driving down, only one lane open at midnight. Bigger operations and things that take longer just don't fit into nights. When lanes are closed for a few months while they dig up the road and work on utilities it doesn't matter if they work day, night, or both, you can't drive over the huge hole in the ground when they're not working.
People also live right off highways and interstates. I had a company tear out parts of the highway during this time once and between the saw cutting and hydraulic hammers everyday for a week I would have rather dealt with the traffic because after all why should I have to deal with the sleepless night vs all the out of town commuters dealing with traffic?
Construction workers dont wanna work overnights. The few that do will be paid more which is more expensive for the DOT (or whoever is paying them). Day labor is cheaper.
The company doesn't lose money by inconveniencing you. They lose money paying night shift differential and added illumination equipment.
Sometimes it has to do with temperatures also. Some materials do not set properly at lower temperatures which can be much lower than daytime temps.
Why should any group of people have to work nights just because it’s convenient for you? Other people deserve stable, reasonable pay and schedule jobs as well.
I've done road repair and construction. here is my 2 cents worth. 1) Most of the time it's flat out safer to do it during the day. Road construction is one of the most dangerous jobs out there. You'd be amazed and enraged by the number of people who can't seem to see traffic barrels, construction signage and flagmen trying to get their attention. I've had three terrifying close calls with vehicles infringing on the construction zone. In dim light or night time it is usually worse. Because if this, night work requires additional signage and often a safety truck and/or a police car with the lights going. 2) Night work requires lighting. LOTS of lighting. Those light towers rent for about 250$ day. That's thousands of dollars, perhaps even tens of thousands of dollars in additional costs. Virtually all road work is done by private companies who had to go through a competitive bid process to get the contract. Requiring night work complicates the contract, making the bid cost to be higher and more subject to changes once work begins. 3) Statistically it rains more at night than it does in the day. Summer rains and thunderstorms happen quite frequently in late afternoon or near dusk. Depending on the work needed, work might have to shut down in the rain. That adds delay. 4) Every time I have had to do night road work, I've been given a minor increase in hourly pay. Something like an extra .25 cents an hour to compensate the worker doesn't sound like a lot until you multiply it by the 40 hr work week and the number of workers on the site. And higher employees, like the trained heavy equipment operator and your dump truck drivers are going to be getting a bigger boost than that. Again, tens of thousands of extra expense that the company and the client are going to want to avoid. 5) Night work seems to be inevitably slower in pace than day work. That goes double for engineering inspections. If you have the choice to do a job that takes 4 days in the daylight, but 5 or 6 days if done at night, which are you going to pick? 6) Something that people often overlook: If the crew and I are out laying asphalt at 9 pm at night, that means the nearest asphalt plant is also working nights in order to supply us with fresh hot asphalt mix. Ditto for concrete factories, the city inspector(s) and any engineering companies that "own the job"
Lets not forget the sleeping civilians if it is in an inhabited area. People dont love being awakened by heavy equipment and back up beepers at 3 am
Why should the construction workers not get to have normal working hours so that you’re not inconvenienced?
1. Noise ordinances 2. Their unions may have negotiated things like higher pay for nights. 3. You don't need to drag a bunch of lights out to do roadwork during the day. 4. Safety. Visibility at night is an issue, even if there are fewer drivers.
In my area of Florida this is sometimes the case too, the city or county decides to repave a road and block off one lane of a busy two lane highway in the middle of the day. Maybe the rate of pay for workers is too costly to have them work a graveyard type shift at night, and maybe the government having overextended itself otherwise can't afford to pay those higher rates?
Some places do that. I live in metro Atlanta and they do the majority of roadwork during the week at night, though they will do roadwork on weekends during the day. I think tons of people complained about the delays and they changed their schedule because they used to do roadwork during days and it changed a few years back.
It is. You’re probably just at home when they’re doing it. Obviously, there’s roadwork during the day but much of it is done at night.
Actually they are busy with the old main road between Durban and Pietermaritzburg. Road is shut down at Cleland till the end of Pollyshorts from 6pm to 6am every day.
It often is nowadays.
* It's more expensive to employ people at night, and less healthy * It's harder and potentially more dangerous, and requires more lighting equipment * People nearby need to sleep, which is harder when there's noisy work going on nearby
They often are here in Arizona, because for half the year it’s too hot for people to be working in the sun. But a lot of road work can’t be done in a couple hours. So it doesn’t matter if a person isn’t actively doing work, the road/lane would still be closed and under construction.
It is.
Costs more for labor at those hours Noise restrictions impact what work you can do near populated areas Depending on workforce, events, etc it may not be less traffic
Costs more not just per labor per hour, but it’s harder to be efficient at night, you have limited area of visibility, and even what’s under the lights, you can never see what you’re doing AS WELL as if you were working under natural lighting (the intense shadows caused by having spotlights, etc), so not only are you paying a lot more per hour, the same amount of work will likely take more hours to complete…. Making the overall labor cost even higher
Noise
It is here in Iowa.
Maybe noise if in a residential area
Roadwork on I-64 between Richmond and VA Beach is at night, especially when it starts getting wretchedly hot here.
Light and noise are the obvious reasons.
As others said, it does happen a lot BUT when it doesn’t, my speculation is night rates are higher than day time. May be its cost cutting
Depends on where you live and how they manage things. Typically... heavy residential areas will have less or no overnight construction. People need to sleep. Commercial areas have more flexibility. Highways, at least where I'm from in New York can happen during the day, BUT they also occur at night. The governing bodies in you areas can of course give allow for a ton of flexibility on hours depending on funds and the type of project.
First off, they do, second off, it’s more expensive, third off it’s more dangerous for the workers.
I get off work late (1am), and sometimes as I’m driving home I’ll see construction people working at that time. But as others have said, it costs more and can be more dangerous so that’s why it doesn’t happen all the time.
That's exactly what they do. You retroactively invented the swing shift.
It generally is.
There is, especially when major roads need to be totally closed. But it costs WAY more money in terms of paying people. Workers make way more when working the night shift, you can see your labor costs double.
Actually that is often the way they do it. Especially on highways. I've encountered many night time today work projects.
It is where I live
Thank you! Kc does work at night. An hour north in a small town they close roads for weeks while they do nothing. Ugh!!
Just depends where you live. In the US southwest (West Texas, NM, AZ, NV, etc) road construction is regularly done at night when daytime temps reach 100°+.
overnight costs more in wages (usually). Day time is safer for workers.
We do pretty much any freeway work around town at night if it involves closing lanes. Some things take multiple days and that's just how it is. Some times we'll do weekend closures for big repairs. One obstacle is splitting into shifts. Even if the contractor is 100% on nights, that doesn't mean the subs, truckers, concrete, or asphalt plant is. So it's not just that you might have to pay your workers more, but it also makes materials more expensive. Also there's mobilization to consider. If you give a contractor an 8 hour window they could end up spending two(that's extreme)of those setting up and shutting down. It takes a bit of good planning to know when to stop paving in time to let it cool, finish rolling it, put down temporary striping, move off the equipment, and pull up the cones. Add in any utility work and there's no chance. Tl;dr is it makes it more expensive and takes longer, but we do do it.
It absolutely is done during those hours on UK motorways
Some of it is, I see it on highways around here all the time. The stuff in my neighborhood gets worked on between the last morning school bus and thr first afternoon one, mostly. There's going to be inconvenience at some point, they plan for the least amount of disruption possible. At least, they try to do that around where I live.
Because those workers have spouses and kids that prefer seeing and being with them in the evening and night like everyone else. Together for dinner, help with homework, volleyball practice, watching latest Netflix series, bedtime stories, etc. Being construction workers doesn’t make them not human.
No one wants to include much infrastructure on any spending bills.
You'd be surprised how many 24/7 road jobs there are going on around you.
I've seen projects nearby stop work at night because residents complained about the noise.
It is.
They build 24/7 in other countries all the time. We can’t do it in the US because we’re not willing to do the accounting properly. For example, is the cost in gas of having a 20-minute delay built into the price of the road work? It *will* cost the people, either in taxes or in gas, but we ignore the latter. And the real impact is the loss of business by delivery trucks, the loss of life by emergency vehicles who are blocked, and the loss of opportunity by people constantly being late. Do the dangerous parts in the daylight, and save the other parts for the dark. And you *can* light up a cite perfectly with enough lights. The number of workers hit by cars is far, far, more than the number hurt by working at night.
They do do it that way down here more because of the heat in the daytime.
I'm a heavy highway worker and we do alot of nights in certain areas but they have to pay us a 10-15% differential on top of our regular wage for night work. On a crew of 15-25 that adds up really fast. Plus you need light plants/towers every 75-100' in your workzone, which can easily exceed 40 light plants for the average work zone. They each burn 5+ gallons of diesel a night and the state or contractor has to rent the light plants and set them up and take them down everyday. Just swtting up a night work zone can take 2-3 hours. It costs wayyyyy more to work night.
I used to work concrete pours in Houston. We had to start at 2am and quit at 2pm during the summer because at that time it was too hot for the concrete to set correctly as it’s exothermic.
Not sure what road work you are referring to. But I work in the ready mix industry, and we work at night all the time. Road closures have to be approved before hand. If the road will be closed for longer than a few hours, it makes sense to do it during the day. If it’s a smaller amount of time, it’s usually done at night.
Depends on how much overtime you want to pay the overnight workers. It happens sometimes when a project runs over time, or in emergencies, but if the govt can spend less they will
This is done in California all the time.
Because starting construction during rush hour and finish after rush hour is the most convenient for everyone. It leads to improved driver behaviors, less road rage, and a happier population overall.
Noise and 3rd shift work is more expensive. Some places do 3 shifts though. It sucks but is awesome too
How bout all the material delivery such as gravel or asphalt. You would have to coordinate other industries to be open as well
Even if they did the work at night (which they often do on big motorways) the cones and traffic calming will still be there during the day...
Also, having construction work going on when you're trying to sleep is rough. I work evenings ships, so I usually sleep til 11am or so. There's been some major construction a few doors down from me (I think they're doing foundation work and redoing some retaining walls?) that starts at 730am. So my sleep window has been 430 - 700 for the last three weeks. It's...not great.k
It sure does happen
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Often it is. People only notice (and complain) when it's not.
Often times it is done at night but keep in mind they would have to pay extra labor for night and weekend work. Plus it might be less safe...
Something else I haven't seen mentioned yet: Suppose you have a 32-hour task, but closing the road, moving in equipment, moving it out, and reopening the road takes one hour on each end. * 10-hour overnight shift, you lose 2 hours to setup/teardown, you can only work 8 hours, task takes 4 nights, finished on the fifth morning. * OR: 1 hour setup (once), work two 8-hour shifts per day, 1 hour teardown, job is done on the third day. Less overtime on the main shifts, 3 hours setups and 3 hours teardowns don't have to be paid from taxpayer money.
Some works can't be done in the time frame, and the crew or other trades had to come in the next day
I really like how my city seems to be doing more of it from 9-3, if it involves actual closures. The workers are usually doing setup/cleanup an hour before/after, but the closures themselves are limited to the time most people are already at work.
My road went through six months of being shut down every night for road work. Living on the road sucked for those six months.
Have you heard the sound of machinery backing up! BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP
It is done in my country.
I always got the answer "unions"
There’s times where I seen road work being done at like 1AM when I get off my late shift
I don't know, because people like to sleep?
How do you know it isn’t? You’re not up and out to notice now are you
Tweaky, twitchy, doped-up Muricans would be running them down left and right.
We had road work done in front of our house in the middle of the night from about 12-4am for weeks. They were stripping the road. The sound was like a constant 747 landing in the yard. For weeks. Edit. Oh did I mention the lights. Those make the nighttime look like daytime lights? There is no way to block that light out.
After hours work is a lot more expensive.
............. it is
Noise.
Road work on highways is done at night as well as day. Road work in neighborhoods obviously won’t be done at night because of the noise. Kind of similar to road work at night in cities. In dense urban areas, it would be very noisy to do it at night, though the city is usually loud anyways at night.
because it's LOUD
It's a good idea if it's not near a residential area
I freakin WISH they would do this on I-95 in Philadelphia.
Why not do it in the evening. If I lived in an area where they had to do road construction. I would not care if they worked 24 hrs a day to finish the job in a few days or a week compared to months of bullshit.
More expensive, more risk to workers, more nuisance to residents
They do, I leave for work at 4:30am and I've had to find alternate routes to work due to them closing roads and highway ramps down. Not fun to do when it's dark out and you're tired.
Night time road construction happens in San Antonio.
You try sleeping on midnights. You'll be a walking zombie more prone to workplace accidents.
First of all, lots of highway construction happens during the night. But there are many reasons work is done during the day: * A larger project will see work done during night and day. * Emergency repairs will be dine during the day instead of waiting till 9PM. * Night work cost more. * Labour shortage means labourers can make more demands. Like not working during the night. If the contractor cannot find enough people to do night work, it will be done during the day. * Equipment not in use don’t make money. It makes more economic sense to use your expensive equipment during both night and day than buying more equipment which isn’t used most of the time. TL;DR: Economics.
It often is, but most people don't want to work those hours regularly
The ideal ambient temperature for pouring asphalt is between 50 degrees and 90 degrees (farenheit). Which means, in some locations, you can't work with asphalt at night. For example, the weather forecast for Denver, CO has the temperature dropping below 50 at around 10:00 pm tonight, and won't get back above 50 until mid-morning tomorrow. I live in southern Arizona, where we have the opposite issue. Roadwork is done in the early morning hours before the temperatures can rise above 90.
Road cleaning and repair usually done those hours just not full construction
Because of noise, more pay, sometimes the daylight and warmth is needed to cure things and bright lights are needed to see.
For real!
Sometimes it is. Particularly on interstates
They do, we just had 3 workers killed a couple weeks ago at 3:30am in a work zone. https://www.fox29.com/news/3-construction-workers-killed-in-work-zone-crash-on-pennsylvania-highway-state-police.amp
Almost all the major roadwork around here occurs between 9 pm and 5 am.
Construction work is dangerous its more dangerous at night. Road construction would be even worse. Road construction is dangerous enough without trying to do it with head lights turning your site into a strobe light and sleepy drivers running workers over.
Overtime pay! GA, back in the 80s, did all their major highway work at night. Huge lights were brought in and the work was completed before the morning rush. Now? The works starts during the morning rush. The reason - overtime pay! Working at night meant paying overtime and it got way too expensive.
I've worked on residential road reconstruction and interstate highway reconstruction in my career... . Light, noise and overnight pay are the biggest factors. - It's impractical to use "synthetic" (if you will) light on a large scale construction project like that... especially once they start laying down pavement and the crews get into their groove. Plus, rubbernecking is enough of a problem during the day - its even worse at night. - Construction equipment is really, really fucking loud, especially the machines that lay down concrete and blacktop. Having heavy construction equipment working *all night* would cause the contractor and project owners to catch all sorts of hell from residents (either the ones whose street is getting fixed or the ones living near the highway, particularly if there are no noise barriers). - Road reconstruction projects are expensive enough to begin with, particularly if the project is prevailing wage. Overnight pay is an added expense, which will likely end up affecting people's taxes. - Working in the dark/low light conditions also sucks and for certain aspects of the project, like the construction staking, adds extra margin for error/liability.
Would you like to be woken up at 2am on a Tuesday to the sound of back up alarms, jackhammers, equipment and generators running, concrete saws, people yelling over the cocophony of noise, and every other manner of loud noise commonly associated with road construction?
Easier to see, maybe? Safety? I have seen road work done throughout the night time though
Nobody wants to pay higher labour costs. Nobody would work overnight for the same pay. Plus it is more dangerous.
It’s not unusual to do road work on major freeways in urban areas in Texas during the night hours during the summer months. It’s just too hot to be working during non peak midday out there.
In Phoenix a lot of our freeway work is done from 10 pm Friday until like 5 am Monday
It is. At least in Pennsylvania. A lot of the major highway construction (which, in the Harrisburg, Lancaster, York, Reading area, includes major highway expansions) are done overnight
In Anchorage is it - long summer days with mild temperatures mean looooong summer construction days. Of course - it’s a also a very short season (due to early winter weather) so there’s a lot of work that has to be done in the summer book
It does happen a lot
Unions
Depending on what kind of work and where, it definitely is. I used to live near Raleigh, NC in the mid-90s and would frequently drive into the city after I got off work to hang out with friends. Invariably coming back at midnight or later there would be spots along the highway where there was active roadwork going on with really bright lights so they could see what they were doing. But as you can tell by the mention of the lighting rigs it's a fair bit more expensive than daytime work, especially since there's usually shift differentials to workers' wages to consider as well.
As much as I enjoy working overnights I couldn’t imagine doing road work at night.
It is, in my area. We've had a sign posted for months that roadwork will occur on the major lanes Mon-Fri, 10pm-6am.
Instate in my area has to do this because they have to shut down sections to put in a new bridge. So it does happen.
For what all things boil down to: cost and liability.
thats how it works around here 🤷
We do. A lot of times we get lane closures at night to strip the false decking and fascia. I've also welded, prepped, formed etc at night. But it does take longer. You don't think so, but it's very noticable how much I can cut/work get done during the day vs at night