Episode 86. The Never Ending Story? Why road projects take so long to complete.

Bernie Fette (00:14):
Hey everyone. Welcome to Thinking Transportation — conversations about how we get ourselves and the stuff we need from one place to another. I’m Bernie Fette with the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. If you’ve spent any time at all traveling on streets and highways, you’ve no doubt encountered construction zones where workers are either building new roads or repairing old ones. And if you’re like most of us, you may have wondered — why is this taking so long? The short version of the answer to that question is … it’s complicated. Here to give us the longer version of the answer is Bill Eisele, a senior research engineer at TTI. Bill is also an associate agency director and research group leader for TTI’s planning Group. Bill, thanks for being with us to explore some of the mysteries of road building.

Bill Eisele (01:10):
Happy to be here, Bernie.

Bernie Fette (01:12):
So maybe it’s a safe guess to say that as we travel about in our cars, on a typical day, most of us have observed situations where we may have thought, wow, they (whoever “they” is) they really need to do something about this road. Is it fair to say that there’s a lot more to it than that?

Bill Eisele (01:34):
Yeah. It really is complex and I’ve been there myself where you go through a particular situation and it’s like, boy, and, and I know better. Those people, whoever “they” is, need to do something about that. And there is a lot to it. There are a lot of different options to be looked into. There are a number of stakeholders who are involved in those decisions and I look forward to unpacking a little bit of that with you.

Bernie Fette (01:59):
Okay, good. Can you start by walking us through some of the higher altitude steps involved in getting a highway built?

Bill Eisele (02:07):
Yeah. Really fundamentally, and as simple as I can get, there’s about five steps. First, there’s a a planning step as you can imagine. Secondly, a project will go into kind of a preliminary design phase. There’s a lot of environmental work that’s done at that stage. Once it passes that, it goes into final design. Then there’s the purchase of right of way, and then finally the construction phase.

Bernie Fette (02:33):
Okay. So you mentioned the planning process first. Now you’re getting a step beyond the big picture maybe, and talk about some of what is involved in that planning process.

Bill Eisele (02:45):
Sure. The planning part is very complex. There’s a number of levels to that. There are a number of plans that are usually in place or being readied by a community. So what really kind of happens broadly is that cities, regions, even at the state level, they’ll have a larger transportation plan where they’ve identified their vision and goals around transportation and what’s important to them. Typically, it has a long time horizon to identify kind of what policies and strategies might support that vision. So then the actual building of a highway, if it gets to that point, must be in line with that plan that’s out there. And so then once that, hey, this is something we wanna pursue, as you can imagine, there’s a lot of those things in the bucket of possibilities. So it’s really necessary to then go in with a, a finer tooth comb, prioritize some of those proposed initiatives, look at identifying initiatives that would be most appropriate, where they’re gonna be available funds for it, and then actually programming it and putting it into what’s often called an improvement program that’s done on a shorter time horizon that says, okay, of all the things in the plan, these are the ones that we can tackle with the funding that we have at this point.

Bill Eisele (04:12):
And there’s a really substantial public involvement process throughout this that’s important to understand it. And in fact, there was a Federal Aid Highway Act that was passed back in 1962 and for urban transportation planning processes, what it did is mandated that as part of a condition to get federal funds in urban areas, you have to go through this thorough planning process. And it kind of coined the term and started, if you will, what’s called a Three C planning process. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, which just means that the planning is continuing, comprehensive, and cooperative. And it all goes back to ensuring that all the stakeholders are involved throughout the entire five steps that I mentioned.

Bernie Fette (05:01):
Okay, good. I was hoping we could talk about the stakeholders next, but one thing that you mentioned makes me wonder, whenever you said that the projects, whenever they get to a certain point and an operating agency decides we’re really serious about these, that’s when they go into what you called an improvement plan. So whenever you go into the improvement plan, that means that they actually become more real, that they actually have a timeframe or a start date assigned to them and maybe even a budget. Is that what happens at that step?

Bill Eisele (05:32):
That’s exactly right. To use Texas kind of as an example. ’cause it’s honestly the one in my backyard that I’m most familiar with, right. They have what’s called their UTP Unified Transportation Program. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, It’s an annual plan that they put together with a 10-year scope. Okay. So they update it every single year. This improvement program was the nuance. If I said plan, it is a plan, but it’s really a program. Because what they do in Texas, for example, is call it the Statewide Transportation Improvement Program. And it’s essentially a four-year plan and it says, okay, these are the ones within the next four years, we’ve got the funding allocated and figured out, and we’re gonna start to move those into our letting process. And the letting process is just a process by which things are funded every couple of years.

Bernie Fette (06:22):
Right. And so that’s when things get serious. That’s when they say, we started with this list of a lot of good, really perhaps worthy projects to improve transportation for the region, but these are the ones we’re serious about.

Bill Eisele (06:34):
Absolutely. That’s well said.

Bernie Fette (06:35):
Okay. Okay. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, talk a little about those stakeholders that you mentioned. Can you help us understand in part the challenge of serving the interests of so many different public officials, business and property owners, and uh, all the others who may be in the mix that I’m not even knowledgeable enough to mention?

Bill Eisele (06:55):
Absolutely. It is an extensive list, and I may miss some, but just depending upon what the scope and the context of the project is, there’s typically going to be federal, state, local transportation professionals that are involved. But not to mention also community groups, interest groups affected interest agencies, transit agencies, active transportation groups. So you think about neighborhoods that might also be involved and probably likely many, many others. And so through that Three C process that I mentioned, its intent is to make sure that those individuals are engaged and have as much opportunity as possible throughout this entire development process to have their voice heard.

Bernie Fette (07:45):
And you’ve got a lot of cooks in the kitchen there for sure.

Bill Eisele (07:49):
No doubt. Varied backgrounds, varied life experiences, varied knowledge in transportation. Some are certainly professionals and, but <laugh>, you know, some are folks that equally have very important perspectives on things.

Bernie Fette (08:06):
I would think varied cultures as well in, in many cases, right? Depending on where we’re talking about.

Bill Eisele (08:12):
Absolutely. Different cultures, different demographics, different life experiences. And they bring all of that into the process. And that’s why it’s so important to have a really strong listening ear in these public involvement sessions because it really does nobody any good to come into those with an idea of here’s what we’re gonna do and here’s what it’s going to look like. Because we really need to, he make sure that as transportation professionals, we’re understanding and hearing what’s happening at the local level, what those neighborhood groups are saying, and what their experiences have been, ’cause they’re the ones that have to live there.

Bernie Fette (08:50):
And what you just mentioned about walking in with an idea or a notion of this is what we’re going to build, this is what it’s going to look like. That’s really how things were for quite a few years in the middle of the last century, beginning back then when road building and the Interstate Highway System were just really getting ramped up. It wasn’t until later, many years later before public involvement became a more prominent part of the whole process. Is that right?

Bill Eisele (09:19):
Yeah, that’s really fair to say. And really that Federal Aid Highway Act in 1962 assisted that and urban transportation planning when it just came out and said, Hey, if you’re gonna get federal funds for something in an urban area, you need to go through this Three C process. You need to make sure that your planning process is continuing, comprehensive, cooperative, and that you’re engaging all those stakeholders.

Bernie Fette (09:44):
And if you do involve all those stakeholders in a really meaningful ongoing way, doesn’t that help an agency or agencies avoid problems along the way? The kinds of problems that come out in the form of legal actions that might delay construction?

Bill Eisele (10:01):
Almost certainly. Yeah. That’s what the planning stages is all about, is to hear where people’s perspectives are, understand what sorts of issues that we may not even be aware of. We’ll, you know, we’ll touch on this with environmental if we have a chance to talk about that. But you know, there could be air quality, other environmental impacts, there could be wildlife considerations. Other things that, as you know, pure highway engineers going into the process just may not be aware of, as an example.

Bernie Fette (10:35):
I understand that travel models, which I believe are predictive models, are also part of that planning process. Can you tell us about that piece of the puzzle?

Bill Eisele (10:46):
Yeah, the travel demand models are a really important part of the planning process and planning stage. Early on, what we do is get some of the observed travel behavior out in a particular region through travel surveys. We identify some of the key trip making characteristics, how many trips are being made, where are they going, how long is the trip, what time are the trips taken, and what’s the mode of travel?

Bernie Fette (11:14):
Can you do that by asking travelers directly about their travel experiences?

Bill Eisele (11:19):
Yes, there are some travel surveys that go out. Also, more recently, we’re able to supplement quite a bit just from probe vehicle data that are out there from different sources that we have, whether they’re cell phones or other probes that are anonymized that provide insight into kind of where the activity is in the network.

Bernie Fette (11:45):
Okay. Talk a little about the environmental piece of this. You had mentioned that earlier as one of the potential areas where things can get slowed down. Can you talk about what’s involved there and why?

Bill Eisele (11:58):
Yeah, so the environmental is certainly important. I touched on it earlier. Environmental impacts are kind of varied. It could be any kind of, you know, noise or traffic or historical preservation issues with water, or plants and animals, air quality, just to name a few. And the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, as it’s affectionately known, was signed into law back in 1970. And again, requires the mandates that the US federal government agencies evaluate the environmental impacts of different actions of different projects. So basically, if you’re gonna take federal funds, you have to do some things to look into what the potential environmental impacts could be.

Bernie Fette (12:45):
What are some of the things that can go wrong at that stage? The environmental clearance stage, maybe that’s not a fair statement. Right. And I think you were about to correct me,

Bill Eisele (12:55):
<laugh>, go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. So I don’t know that it’s necessarily going wrong, but there are things that may take longer, right? For example, you come across a rare plant or a species of animal that’s been living there, and where the preliminary design is saying that there could be a road built. And so then that needs to have special mitigation and special consideration and can make that process take a little bit longer.

Bernie Fette (13:25):
Is there any way to speed up that process whenever an agency encounters some of those things that you’ve described?

Bill Eisele (13:32):
Yeah, so one way that the environmental process can be sped up is through what’s called NEPA assignment. And Texas is one of 11 states that have this. And what it allows then is it allows for the state to assume some of that federal responsibility for the transportation projects in exchange for a little bit faster federal review process. So that does help to streamline this and mitigate the time involved.

Bernie Fette (14:01):
After the environmental process after that step’s taken care of what comes next?

Bill Eisele (14:06):
Yeah, so we’ve worked through planning, we’ve worked through a preliminary design and environmental process. Once the environmental process is blessed for movement to go forward, then you go into final design. Once the final design is completed, then typically a project goes into the right-of-way acquisition stage. And then after that, and only after that do we finally get to the point where you start to see something on the road. And that is the construction.

Bernie Fette (14:36):
And that’s one of the things I think as a subset of the overall process that I was hoping we can talk about today. Once people start to see those signs of construction, they can see the trucks coming out, they see the people in the hard hats, and the orange or yellow vests, even then ground is broken. And it may be years in many cases before that road sees a ribbon cutting. Why is that?

Bill Eisele (15:05):
Yeah, there’s many factors that can go into that. I’ll highlight a couple. Traffic control is really important. For example, you know, just like when a doctor operates, right? You gotta keep the patient alive. We’ve gotta keep the transportation system flowing. So there’s a lot that has to happen sort of in real time moving traffic. And we’ve all went through it, went through work zones and things change over time, right? So there’s this constant having to stay on top of the traffic control. Sometimes that can take quite some time. One of the big things that we see is just weather conditions. You have to have good weather conditions in order to conduct a highway construction project. You know, you have to keep the water out of the site. We have to make sure that soil and that’s placed into the roadway is at the proper moisture content. So we can’t have anything flooding, you know, just in order for it to be able to compact properly and be able to put the layers on. And then good old concrete in and of itself needs time to cure. If you’ve got a concrete pavement that you’re putting in, to my point about the traffic congestion or the traffic still needing to move, sometimes you have to go to to night work, you know, simply because there’s just so much traffic during the day. And so all these different things can have some impact on the project itself.

Bernie Fette (16:31):
Because if you don’t keep a roadway operating while you’re working on it, while you’re widening it or improving it in some way, that traffic has to go somewhere. And the rest of the transportation system in a given city perhaps wouldn’t necessarily be well-suited to absorb all of that traffic demand while you close down a major highway just so that you could finish the work a little faster. Is that fair to say?

Bill Eisele (16:59):
That’s very fair to say and is very accurate. In fact, some of those travel demand models that we have, we can look at because we have a sense of the driver behavior, we can look at those different construction scenarios. You know, what if we close a lane? What if we close two lanes? What if we close the whole thing? You know, what’s that impact potentially going to be on the system? So it’s balancing what you’re seeing as a driver going through that work zone and a lot of other roads that we’re also having to consider on some of these large projects.

Bernie Fette (17:32):
What you’ve described is a very detailed and thorough, extensive painstaking process. Would you say in your observation that most projects typically move along at a relatively steady and predictable pace? Or are we talking about a process in which something is relatively likely to, again, I don’t necessarily wanna say go wrong, but that it’s relatively certain that there are gonna be surprises along the way and we just need to be prepared to make adjustments?

Bill Eisele (18:07):
Actually, Bernie, I think it’s both. I think the process is good. I think it’s thorough. I think it asks the right question and guides the stakeholders through the right process. That said, it’s pretty rare that, you know, something doesn’t come up, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> that’s gonna throw things off. But I think that’s why the process is good, is because it’s been kind of tested and it sort of, it is what it is, right? All the primary stakeholders, funding agencies accept it and it’s working, you know, I know it can be frustrating when we’re sitting through that traffic and those work zones week after week, month after month, year after year in some cases. But I think it sure beats the alternative of just kind of plowing forward without being, having a, a meaningful thought process for all of these different things.

Bernie Fette (19:00):
I’m gonna go out on a limb here, and just guess that maybe in your years of research that you may have noticed an item or two or a place or two in the process where you thought, if I could wave a magic wand, I would change this. But I’m not gonna ask you about that just yet. That’s just a little hint if you want to get ready for that one, <laugh>. But first I wanted to ask you, you’ve been really helpful in giving us a better understanding of why road projects can sometimes take years to complete. I’m wondering about exceptions to that rule when reconstruction of a certain major road or bridge gets fast tracked. So we’re talking about measuring construction time in months rather than years. I’m gonna bring up the example of the Interstate 35 bridge in Minneapolis back in 2007. I’m guessing there are others. Can you talk a little about what happens, how decisions like that are made? What merits a decision to fast track a project of that sort?

Bill Eisele (20:06):
Yeah, it’s a really good question. And I would say that the process, again, is still pretty similar. We have this planning phase, we have preliminary final design stages. Maybe there’s no right away if we’re just fixing something and then we move right into construction. So in those situations, it’s pretty clear everybody wants the project, right? So most people are swimming downstream and in line with it because after all that infrastructure was there. And when an interstate falls down, everybody misses it immediately. Everybody’s kind of on board with it. So then it just becomes kind of a cleanup and construction and a funding issue. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And if people are all on board, things can move along much faster. And also, we didn’t touch on it, but something else that can sometimes be put in the construction phases are incentives to contractors by day. You know, if you finish a day earlier, you get X amount of incentive. And so they can make out pretty good if they can successfully.

Bernie Fette (21:13):
We’re talking about bonus cash payments.

Bill Eisele (21:15):
Correct. Yep. Okay. They

Bernie Fette (21:17):
Can,

Bill Eisele (21:18):
Yep. Because there’s a cost every day that it’s not constructed and delay and, and impacts, and so it makes a whole lot of sense to do that.

Bernie Fette (21:28):
Yeah. Would you expect the bridge in Baltimore to be another example of a fast tracking scenario?

Bill Eisele (21:37):
I do. Anything large like that. I think the president came out shortly thereafter and said, hey, this is critically important to us. We’re gonna look at ways to get this funded quickly and, and you know, so those conversations were nearly immediate as to how that can get repaired.

Bernie Fette (21:57):
I’m gonna ask you to step back and take a really broad view for a couple of minutes. You’re in the research business, you and your colleagues are always trying to make things a little better. If a research sponsor gave you a blank check tomorrow and you could study the road building, planning process, building process, the entire process, if you could study that in any way that you thought you could and funding wasn’t an issue, how would you approach that? What kind of questions would you try to answer? Is there a better way to do things? What might things look like if we turned you loose with a blank check and a magic wand?

Bill Eisele (22:45):
I think the part, and I’ve got a couple actually, I live a lot in the planning realm, and it’s really important to me that we get everybody’s opinions and feedback on projects and make sure that we have everybody represented in life experiences captured in projects. And one of the things that I kind of struggle with is in this day and age, how do we best make sure that we’re capturing all those people? How do we best engage everybody in that process? You know, COVID kind of changed some things. It certainly made us more electronic. It’s certainly made us, I don’t know, for a while there not as interested in going to meetings or perhaps having public meetings online. So just making sure that we’re doing state of the practice across the nation and at the federal, state and local levels to ensure we’re getting everybody incorporated into the process. There is a quite a bit of research that’s been done in this space, and there are some innovative ways to get folks engaged, but that would be the first one is making sure that we’re getting all those channels of communication open.

Bernie Fette (24:13):
There’s one,

Bill Eisele (24:14):
And another one, and this is getting a little bit outside of my particular scope, but a little bit more in the weeds, and that is, you know, utility relocations and just one of the things that’s so frustrating for people is you drive through these work zones and it doesn’t look like anything’s being done and it’s like, boy, they were just working on their, now they’re still working on it. Or now they have a different excavator out there where right, suddenly all the lights go out in the neighboring <laugh> subdivision, right? So it’s the underground utilities, gas pipes, electric tables, water lines, sewer lines, all that stuff. That’s kind of that prep work and just systems management systems to have in place to understand and make sure that we know where all of those things are. This is another space in utility engineering, we call it, where we’re doing some work here at TTI, but that’s one of those that it always seems like we can use evermore information in making sure that we’ve got the proper plans because there’s, there’s how things were planned, and then there’s as-built plans, right? How we actually ended up having to put those utilities in. And when you start digging stuff up, it always seems like things are in different places.

Bernie Fette (25:38):
One surprise after another.

Bill Eisele (25:40):
Absolutely.

Bernie Fette (25:42):
If you had to summarize or prioritize one or two big takeaways from our discussion, you know, the kind of thing that you hoped that our listeners, if they remembered nothing else, that they would remember this one thing, what would that one thing be?

Bill Eisele (25:58):
You are part of the process in any highway project, you don’t necessarily get to complain about what you’re seeing on the road. If you haven’t made an attempt to get yourself involved in the process and explain your point of view, make sure that the public or the officials that are involved with the project have a chance to hear from you at the appropriate time. I think that’s the biggest thing. This has kind of been a theme, you’ve heard it come up two or three times with me now, is just making sure that we get people engaged. And I understand it’s hard, you know, we’re all so very busy and guilty myself. Oftentimes we don’t get ourselves engaged until we see the dirt start moving and the truck starts showing up and then it’s like, oh, wait a minute, wait a minute. So that’s advice that I have for everybody, and that’s kind of my key takeaway and it’s advice that I have to remind myself of as well.

Bernie Fette (27:00):
What more than anything else motivates you to show up to work every day?

Bill Eisele (27:08):
I love the challenges in the transportation industry. I’ve been blessed to work with great people and work on wonderful projects, and that’s what keeps me going is just being able to, to help out society. Public service is very important to me, and transportation has been a wonderful avenue for that in my life.

Bernie Fette (27:32):
We’ve been visiting with Bill Eisele, associate agency director and leader of TTI’s Planning Group. Bill, thanks so much for joining us and helping us understand the mysteries of road building. We do appreciate it.

Bill Eisele (27:48):
Absolutely. Thanks, Bernie. It was a lot of fun.

Bernie Fette (27:53):
Planning, preliminary design, final design, right of way, purchase and construction. Together, those steps constitute the process for building a highway, and each one by itself involves numerous milestones, any of which can be upended by a wide range of surprises along the way. It’s a lengthy and complex process on the way from groundbreaking at the start to ribbon-cutting upon completion, emphasizing direct engagement with everyday travelers and other stakeholders every step of the way. Thanks for listening. Please take just a minute to give us a review, subscribe and share this episode. And please join us next time for another conversation about getting ourselves and the stuff we need from point A to point B. Thinking Transportation is a production of the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, a member of the Texas A&M University System. The show is edited and produced by Chris Pourteau. I’m your host, Bernie Fette. Thanks again for joining us. We’ll see you next time.