If you’ve ever driven on highways, you’ve probably seen a road that was under construction. It’s even worse if you’re on the same road as the road being worked on because you probably have to change lanes and it makes your drive even longer. I think that road construction takes too long and something needs to be changed.

Road construction is something that does take time, on average a road takes two or three years to fully complete. There are actually multiple reasons for roads to take so long. For starters, there are a lot of meetings that need to be done to get everything finalized, such as the plan of who is doing what and where.

There are a lot of other reasons for roads to take so long, and one issue can be the lack of government spending. When a company wins a bid to start working on a road, the government won’t give them the full amount of money they need to finish the road, once they’re done with one part, the government will give them another sum of money which can take some time. This can lead to roads being closed but no one working on them for long periods of time when it’s not even their fault.

Of course, a big issue is the concrete, since it can take up to a month to dry. You’re working on a road that thousands of people will drive on every day, so it has to be perfect, it takes a long time not just to dry, but also to get it perfectly even. I would think that if the concrete took so long to dry, we should make something that could dry it faster. 

Companies also don’t work together that much to complete construction. After a group wins a bid, collaboration almost doesn’t exist. If companies actually worked together, they could speed up the process and make everything less of a struggle for everyone. I think the bidding process shouldn’t exist, I think multiple teams from one big company should exist and be assigned to work on certain projects.

On average, construction laborers make about $16 an hour, which isn’t that bad. About 23% of construction workers are self-employed as well, which means they could procrastinate working to make more money. How much people make for their jobs is a bigger issue, though. 

Weather is also a big issue that can’t be prepared for and could also halt work for a long time. If the weather is really bad, it can make you lose work, considering rain could mess up concrete drying. There should be ways to take more care of the work to make everything go faster, because no one wants to do all that hard work again.

At the end of the day, there are a lot of answers to why road construction takes so long. There are ways to fix these issues, but it’s unlikely anything changes in the future. Every company has probably tried to combat these issues in the past, but did not succeed. It seems like nothing has been done to change these issues and it doesn’t look like there’s much that can be done.