| POLICIES AND PROCEDURES
Road Construction
Just like death and taxes are
unavoidable facts of life, road construction and reroutes are unavoidable
facts
of cycling events. We have neither run a cycling
event nor participated in another one in Illinois
run by another organization where some sort of road
construction hasn’t been affected the ride in some way. There
is an old saying that there are two seasons in Illinois – winter
and road construction and although we won’t know
when or where or how, we can almost guarantee you that
our
plans will change somehow in response to road construction.
The best thing for our participants to do is be mentally
ready for these situations.
We cannot completely eliminate road construction on our route but we
do minimize the amount we have to deal with. We paint our
directional signage directly on our route about two to three weeks before
the start of the event and make as many route changes due to existing road
construction
conditions as necessary. Unfortunately though this still leaves two or three
weeks when road construction can still occur. Regrettably we can’t
plan on painting the route immediately before the start
of the event because
we need to leave in some leeway time in the painting schedule in case it
rains
when
we planned on painting the route.
As much as we would like to know about and avoid any road construction conditions
that are started during this two or three week time frame, regrettably this
is not logistically possible considering the myriad of separate federal,
state, county, township, road district, and municipal transportation authorities
we would have to deal with over every mile of our routes. And even if
we were able to contact all these agencies, they might not tell us about
construction coming up, schedule work between the time we talk to them and
when we come through and not tell us about it, or not be able to tell
us about upcoming construction because of lack of internal communication
on their own part.
It is much more effective and efficient to reactively
respond to any new road construction during the event itself than to try
to avoid it beforehand.
Click Here for more
information about reroutes around adverse road conditions.
Two Quick Road Construction Stories
These situations actually happened on previous events and we hope will give
you an idea of what can (or cannot) be expected in terms of road construction
and also a little bit of a chuckle as well. Let us apologize in advance
if you’re a road construction worker, you guys do a heck of a job,
but road construction can be a real pain in the rear during our events!
As you will see, some of the road construction situations we have encountered
are just so completely unpredictable that at the end of the day, once all
our participants have arrived safely, we can’t do anything but throw
our hands in the air and laugh about it!
Road Construction Story #1: In the first situation, we received word
from a few participants that we had supposedly missed putting down some painted
directional
signage
marks
at one of our turns. We thought this was kind of odd since we both paint
the turns before the start
of the event and doublecheck them during the event
itself but hey no one’s perfect, it is possible (though extremely
unlikely) that we could miss marking a turn two times.
So the staff member who
scouted the route drove back to that location to fix the situation and
the marks were
in fact missing, but the reason was that a road construction crew had
laid down fresh pavement on top of them between the time the staff member
had
gone through in the morning but before all the riders had arrived there!
Road Construction Story #2: In the second situation, it was about
7:00 am when our scout came up on a road construction worker stopping traffic
on
a part of the route that went
northbound for about a mile and a half. They were resurfacing half
of the road at a time and had luckily started repaving the southbound side,
not the northbound side. The scout informed the road construction
worker that a number of cyclists would soon be coming through and asked him
when they would begin resurfacing
the northbound lanes and he said he thought maybe around 11:00 am but couldn’t
make any guarantees.
So the scout phoned ahead to all the previous rest stop
attendants so they could inform all the participants of the situation
and not to go slow or waste time so they could make it through the road construction
zone before the northbound side got repaved. Everyone ended up making in
through
in time, and we were very glad no one got stuck!
|
