Road construction is so common that motorists probably don’t think much about it unless they live in the affected area. Even then, they may not know how involved a particular project will be.
Residents of Wixom, Mich., know one project very well. The city partnered with the Road Commission for Oakland County and completed a large road safety and functionality project on the much-traveled Grand River Avenue a few years ago. It started Oct. 2, 2023, and stopped over the winter months. Construction restarted on April 1, 2024, and was completed in late August that same year.
The project was started and stopped for multiple reasons, every one of them vital. The first phase consisted of milling off, or cold planing, the old pavement. The milling process requires special machinery that grinds and removes the top layer of asphalt. A benefit to employing the milling method of asphalt removal is that the old pavement, or millings, can be reused for new road construction. Once that process is completed, new paving is laid down…