Rumble and Scrape

A Wirtgen W 2200 cold milling machine doing its thing: what it sounds like when 100,000 pounds of machine is rolling along on tracks scraping up pavement.

Let's get ready to rumble

What he left behind

This was just about the loudest, noisiest, squeakiest road machine I've heard working in a long time. Maybe ever. This massive, 50 ton cold milling machine is grinding along peeling off the top of the road so they can put down a new top. It's kind of hard to ride a bicycle on this, so I took the sidewalk option, but still road on it to cross the street. The scraping seems to have shredded the detection loops for the lights, which actually worked to my advantage, since they seem to have known it would happen, and just set the lights to change on a generous timer. 

New surface coming here

 
In a rational and well-planned world, they would put down sweet rubberized asphalt here, followed by sharrows, or a bike lane. I say that because this is my personal pet peeve stretch of Phoenix road, a primary and not easily bypassed connector marked as a bike route on the maps, bordered by a semi-busy sidewalk that's not really a good option, and populated with five lanes of traffic moving at 50 mph. I'll check it out when they're done and report back my findings. Get up. Go ride.