How do road works work in this country?

TLDR: Racer to the bottom subtracting to keep costs cheap (to councils and profits high for the major companies winning the work) combined with health and safety regs and councils themselves. As someone who worked for a company that had to do lots of roadworks, albeit short term never more than 1 night) it's a combo of: Subcontractors - Main firms who get the work can't (or won't) pay to have an internal delivery team therefore its more efficient to sub it out. And the nature of subcontracting for that type of work is lowest fee wins as it affects profit. The Traffic management subcon I had were fucking awful and o had regular arguments with them. Councils - local road closures are managed by councils, so they often have requirements and this is often the reason for the over the top arrangements of cones and lights for a minor job and again cost, councils always go cheap. It's cheaper to pay a company to leave cones out for 3 weeks then to put up and take down every day etc. The time of work itself depends on the work of course. I had a team to dig up the road and reinstate who are labourers, I had a team of engineers doing the proper work, often two or three depending on what they needed to do. So it resulted in some guys standing around waiting for the previous work to finish. That's the nature of the work though. Additionally when I went out to supervise or audit, I am inevitably standing around watching too. Doesn't look great to the outside but there aren't many better ways to do my work. But as I said we were In and out on 1 shift so less intrusive compared to the utilities works that seem to take forever.