I love to see infrastructure jobs like this that don't interfere with people's daily lives. A similar feeling when I watch the Japanese build a subway in just 3 hours: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BYW4YYqG5A
Meanwhile, just down the road from me, we've had a major bridge closed since April of last year, and is due to reopen October 2024....
Videos like this should be a lesson to Civic planners everywhere.
this particular change took 3 hours. but generally speaking there were years of planning and other construction works that made a 3 hour switch even possible.
Japanese rail projects aren't particularly fast. The subway line that was connected in this 3 hour switch started construction in 2001, finished in 2008, and the connection made in the video was completed in 2013. https://ja-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/%E6%9D%B1%E4%...
One other thing that makes the 3 hour window possible is the sheer amount of manpower they throw at the problem during these three hours. the US does not have a project construction industry built around swarming, but rather maintaining a lower cost small crew at all times. One reason why there is so much construction in Japan is because the government has relied on fiscal stimulus to the point where it now has the highest debt-to-GDP in the world at a rate of 263%.
They often work under a different set of political or administrative constraints that make these things impossible to execute. Seeing it done on one stretch of road is entirely different than allocating 100 miles worth of repaving budget to a 5 mile stretch to avoid inconvenience. That's a tough sell.
And they do do things when it’s warranted, like the bridge replacements where they build a whole new bridge next to the existing one and swap it overnight.
Meanwhile, just down the road from me, we've had a major bridge closed since April of last year, and is due to reopen October 2024....
Videos like this should be a lesson to Civic planners everywhere.