I’m kind of fascinated by certain roadwork.

Not, like, mid-day roadwork on the Merritt Parkway where traffic backs up for miles due to lane closures and it doesn’t look like they’re even doing anything. For instance.

But less inconvenient roadwork…like the sidewalk replacement work they’re doing in my neighborhood.

This has been a two-phase project that paused for the school year.

We live just off a roughly 1.5-mile stretch of road that least to one elementary school and one middle school.

Last year they re-paved essentially the northeastern part of the street, and then replaced the sidewalks and curbs of that part. (Part of the work is making the sidewalks more ADA compliant, I think.)

Then nothing happened during the school year, and right after the school year ended in June, they got to work on the end of the street nearer where we live.

They dug up and then paved the street first.

Then they dug up the sidewalks.

Then they replaced the curbs.

And slowly but surely they’ve been filling the sidewalks with concrete.

It’s interesting to watch the progress as I come and go from work - they seem to be working their way downhill…but they also work around people’s driveways. First they break up the sidewalk, then they mark off where they’re going to cut off the driveway, and then they kind of repave the sidewalk-to-driveway transition.

This stretch to the corner used to be concrete and now it will be grass.

And on the corner nearest us, they have shortened the sidewalk, and are planting grass where there used to be sidewalk so it blends right into those houses’ lawns.

It’s all very cool - and to be honest, until they started this work, I forgot all about the work they did last summer.

I’ve had to run in the street for a while around the broken up sidewalks but they’re almost done with the entire stretch of sidewalk.

…and this is what it looks like after the concrete was poured.

And soon enough I’ll be running on the sidewalks entirely forgetting what they used to look like.