oh crap, all that text was supposed to be inside. sorry.

I'd pick option 1 but that's because I know I can take a different route for those 2 weeks, or work at home a day or two a week.

A. Make it quick and no full shutdowns.

Admin...can you fix this so that everything that's not the title is in a "more inside" tag? Thanks.

whichever version i encountered at the time would seem to me, while i was encountering it, to be the worst of all possible worlds. i would become irrational and stupid about it and would engage in nearly apopleptic screaming at the time, and then when it was all over i would forget about it completely.

so go with a, it's faster and cheaper. what i think doesn't matter.

Option A involves shutting five lanes down to either two or three, but not a complete shutdown. Although a complete shutdown would certainly be the fastest way to get the job done. :)

A

Option A.

I'll take A. Just make it quick!

b). Where I drive (the 405 in L.A.) losing two lanes during the day would be an absolute disaster and probably shut down the city.

If you do (A), and promise us that it will take only a third of the time, cost two-thirds as much, and the workers would not have to deal with the danger of being killed by the nearby traffic, then I will accept.

The route I take to and from work is going from eight lanes elevated to 12 lanes depressed. This project is costing $100Million per mile, I believe, and is in the third year. Soon, soon, soon it will be done.

If this could have been done in 14 months, and all of us commuters would have to take another highway, or the bus, or the neighborhood streets, I would have reluctantly agreed.

Thanks for asking.

As a (mostly) reasonably sane person, I'd always choose option A, but unfortunately UDOT always manages to combine the high-impact of A with the cost and time of B.

*sigh*

Until I moved back to working in the city and catching the train, I used to commute up and down the M1 (not the one on Britain) and closing two of the four lanes in peak times would have shut down the entire corner of the state, so that could never happen - they even do all the roadside maintenance at night.

But if the choice was two weeks high impact or four months low impact, I would take the two weeks. Main Roads seems to have got the night work thing pretty well sorted, though, so I think the time frame would be more like two weeks high impact or three weeks low impact. When they work at night, they can shut down more of the highway than they can during the day and reduce the speed limits.

Another L.A. driver chiming in to say option B, even with the full knowledge of its expense. As drjimmy notes, 2 weeks of option A could be a disaster in whole swaths of LA, depending on the particular location and the relative lack of alternate routes (most of which are usually pretty heavily congested to begin with). And I say this as someone with two of the easiest, non-highway-oriented commutes in all of SoCal (4 blocks walking if I go to work from my house; a half-hour driving if I go from scodyboy's house in Studio City, which includes less than 2 miles on the Hollywood Freeway).

If the project is I-5 between I-90 Interchange and Spokane Street, there aren't really that many alternate routes except directly through downtown, so it sounds like it would be a clusterfuck if you do option A. This is one point I am glad I don't work downtown.

B. They did that with the 101 when I was commuting between Thousand Oaks and Van Nuys.

I grew up in L.A., and I picked B reflexively. I guess it depends on where this is; anywhere in L.A., option A would shut the city down and result in backups that could take days to resolve.