The presenter not only worked on the project in question but was involved with the Construction Management side of the project; so knowledge of which embankment were ready to handle loads or not was indeed known.
So the presenter was criticizing his own project and his managing of how the trucks were driving to the site?
The presentation was
in-house; i.e. within the company/firm... where there's a little more liberty for frankness & candor. During these types of presentations; several aspects of a project, both good/positive &
could do better are discussed with the latter being part of a
lessons learned segment. For the benefit of those unfamiliar with the term or what exactly gets discussed; such usually involves either procedures and/or unforeseen site condition encounters as well as communications.
The truck routing comment the presenter stated, after showing the photos, went along the lines of (paraphrasing), "
Why the trucks drive through town when they could've either gone on the stabilized road embankment or taken other roads outside the town center; I have no idea." The latter part of that statement would certainly
imply that the routing was GPS generated. It is worth noting that the truck routing was not discussed in the
lessons-learned portion of this particualr presentation (such may have been done more privately).
While you are correct that construction vehicles can't access a particular site via an embankment
early on during the project; the steel beams for the many of the overpasses were brought to the site well after the embankments were put in place & settled. Such is not unusual; the Blue Route portion of I-476 (between I-76 & PA 3) had its road embankment in place years prior to the overpass beams being erected. Whether the contractor that brought out the beams was the same as the contractor who placed the embankment (one could've been a sub-contractor to the other) is not known... at least to me anyway.
Playing devil's advocate for one second, it's possible that the contractor transporting the beams was taking said-route due as they did early on in the project carrying other construction equipment and/or embankment fill material; i.e. was in
auto-pilot & didn't realize that they could use portions of the unopened road to get to their site. Nonetheless, construction vehicles going through towns is one thing; going through with oversized cargo (the overpass beams) is another.
To be fair, and I probably should've expounded on such earlier; while the presenter was indeed involved on the Construction Management (CM) side of things, he himself was not the CM in charge (who didn't attend or assist in the presentation). Why the CM in charge didn't direct the trucks carrying the beams to go a certain route is unknown. Maybe one of the lesson-learned items should've been better communication amongst contractors/delivery vehicles.
Typically projects of this size include contractor haul-route plans for the various stages & phases; however, there have been cases where a contractor will either go their own route until they get closer to their destination or not realize
hey, I can now use Phase X routing. In other instances & let's be honest here; some will view the more remote portion of those routings as
mere suggestions.
I will never understand how truckers bound for New York will still take the off-ramp on the Charter Oak Bridge at the last minute. New York is very well signed there. There's no excuse.
Are you referring to
Exit 90 along CT 15? The ramp for I-91 southbound (Exit 86) is beyond the bridge.
There
used to be a commercial vehicle restriction for this stretch of CT 15 as well as the Charter Oak Bridge but such was eliminated over two decades ago following the bridge being reconstructed.