Friday, August 14, 2009

Is It Planes Landing Or Pavement Grinding?

I was driving through Spokane a couple days ago with a couple friends from Olympia and a backseat full of kids. There was a lot of complaining about all the construction we kept running into (I admit, a lot of that complaining came from me, despite the fact that the construction keeps me in a job). One of my friends asked why they don't do all construction work overnight on the east side of the state like they do in her neck of the woods. Well, this is why.

This is an article and video from the WSDOT blog demonstrating how loud pavement grinding can be at 2 in the morning. Apparently, some people have compared it to the sound of airplanes landing. Yikes, that's loud! So would you rather listen to that all night when you have to work at 7 a.m. or spent an extra 10 minutes a day stuck in traffic because of construction? Yeah, I'll quit complaining now.

1 comment:

vanillajane said...

Here's an exerpt from your link:
" It takes one of our grinders about 10 minutes to grind 60 feet of concrete four feet wide*. The average property lot along I-5 is between 50 and 60 feet wide. This means that if the grinders are working directly near your home, you will hear the noise ramp up and then ease off over a period of about an hour as the grinders move down the highway and away from your area."

That doesn't seem so bad to get it done in a couple of nights as opposed to years.


About SRTC

SRTC is the federally designated Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for Spokane County. Urbanized areas with populations exceeding 50,000 people are required to have an MPO. SRTC was formed to address the county's transportation planning needs. It provides coordination in planning between the public, cities, small towns, the county, the state, transit providers, and tribes.

SRTC offers services including transportation monitoring, transportation modeling, census information analysis, travel demand forecasting, historical traffic count analysis, geographic information systems, and trip generation rates.