The 30-year programme aims to carry out repairs to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act and ensure universal access. Los Angeles is home to roughly 11,000 miles of pavements, many of which hinder passage because of cracks, buckles and bulging tree roots.
HDR is already engaged in multiple municipal sidewalk repair programmes, including a five-year project in Boston, Massachusetts, and a comprehensive sidewalk study in Georgetown, Texas. Its services in LA include design, programme management and construction management for all planned improvements.
In early 2015, the firm helped the city launch the programme through an on-call contract and integrated with the Department of Public Works to form a single team, sharing office space in the department's headquarters. "We partnered with city staff to define near-term and long-term strategies for repairing city sidewalks," said HDR project manager Scott Bacsikin. "In the first eight months, we reconstructed 20 miles of equivalent 5-foot sidewalk compliant with ADA."
HDR has employed technical innovations to streamline information gathering and management, among them creating a GIS-based mobile application that makes more efficient use of field research time. The app allows the engineer to enter measurements on site and simultaneously generates a scope of work and engineer's estimate, and geocodes the repair location's coordinates.
"Without this application, an engineer physically has to measure the area in need of repair, noting measurements on paper and returning to the office to input them into software that will develop the scope of repair and generate an estimate," Bacsikin said. "It saves time and money."
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