Imagine you come home from a long day at work and see signs running the length of your block announcing upcoming road construction. Maybe it’s just a day or two, you hope. Two years later you’re still waiting for the racket to end.

This is what happened on my street in 2022.

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First, San Francisco Public Works and the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission systematically replaced the aging, century-old sewer main, culverts, and lateral pipelines running beneath the asphalt. The noise was so jarring and so constant that my husband and I wore noise canceling headphones all day for months.

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Eventually, the work finished and our dug-up street was covered over. But not long after, the city dug it up again — this time for water main replacement work.

When it finally came time for repaving, huge milling machines equipped with large, spiked rotating drums ground away the top two inches of old asphalt. The noisy work resulted in a completely uniform, textured subgrade for fresh asphalt to easily bond to. 

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Sweeper trucks then vacuumed up the ground-asphalt, which was hauled away to be recycled into new pavement. You can imagine what that sounded like.

Finally, nearly two years after work started, paving machines came to lay down a fresh, smooth asphalt layer and quiet was restored.

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Put away your tiny violin. I’m hardly the only one in San Francisco who has faced this familiar, deeply frustrating urban ritual.

But this experience made me wonder: Is there a method to the city’s madness? Or is all this disruption another example of poor coordination making life miserable for residents? 

"If a road is being cut up multiple times, the resident sees this........

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