Contractor-Furnished Compaction Testing: Searching for Correlations Between Potential Alternatives to the Nuclear Density Gauge in Missouri Highway Projects

The Missouri Department of Transportation’s (MoDOT) past and present Quality Control and Quality Assurance programs for construction are examined. MoDOT’s present Quality Management program along with a small number of grading projects has lowered the number of Quality Assurance (QA) soil compaction tests completed in the past two years. The Department would like to rid itself of using the Nuclear Density Gauges because of burdensome Federal regulations, required training, security and licensing fees. Linear and multiple regression analysis was performed to see if a correlation between nuclear density gauge dry densities values and Light Weight Deflectometer modulus values/ Clegg Hammer Clegg Impact Values exist. These relationships or lack thereof will determine the technology used by construction contractors to perform compaction quality control testing if MoDOT moves away from using nuclear density gauges for soil density verification

Measuring users\u27 impact to support economic growth through Transportation Asset Management planning

The Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21), was enacted by the US Congress to support the economic growth of regions. With this in mind, the state Departments of Transportation (DOT) policies for allocating construction and maintenance funds for infrastructural rehabilitation represent a mechanism to spur economic growth. Economic downturns highlight the importance of a transparent, cost-effective methodology for allocation of scarce resources that provide equity to the entire population of road users. The paper proposes adding social and economic components to the current traffic-based prioritisation method for low-volume, rural bridges in Iowa and evaluates the potential change in the distribution of funding among the state\u27s structurally deficient bridges. The proposed method illustrates the value-added of transportation infrastructure projects to the state\u27s agricultural economy, concluding that the addition of socioeconomic factors to the current decision-making process can increase the net benefit of the investments in low-volume bridges to the state\u27s agricultural economy

Managing geotechnical risk on US design-build transport projects

Awarding design-build (DB) contracts before a complete subsurface investigation is completed, makes mitigating the risk of differing site conditions difficult, if not impossible. The purpose of the study was to identify effective practices for managing geotechnical risk in DB projects, and it reports the results of a survey that included responses from 42 of 50 US state departments of transportation and a content analysis of DB requests for proposals from 26 states to gauge the client’s perspective, as well as 11 structured interviews with DB contractors to obtain the perspective from the other side of the DB contract.  A suite of DB geotechnical risk manage tools is presented based on the results of the analysis. Effective practices were found in three areas: enhancing communications on geotechnical issues before final proposals are submitted; the use of project-specific differing site conditions clauses; and expediting geotechnical design reviews after award. The major finding is that contract verbiage alone is not sufficient to transfer the risk of changed site conditions. The agency must actively communicate all the geotechnical information on hand at the time of the DB procurement and develop a contract strategy that reduces/retires the risk of geotechnical uncertainty as expeditiously as possible after award

A Framework for Guaranteed Maximum Price and Contingency Development for Integrated Delivery of Transportation Projects

This paper discusses the components of a guaranteed maximum price (GMP) and proposes a framework for the development of GMPs as contract payment provisions for construction manager-at-risk (CMR) and design-build (DB) contracts for transportation projects. The framework is the synthesis of a comprehensive literature review, a content analysis of CMR and DB solicitation documents and contracts, and case study project output from twelve projects in nine states worth $3.1 billion. The research also discusses the development of three common types of contingencies that are often utilized in projects with GMPs. The study concludes that owners should specify the structure of the GMP and its components to enhance clarity and understanding of the GMP’s composition. It recommends that this structure be included in the CMR and DB solicitation documents so that pricing proposals can be formulated in a manner that is consistent with the contract payment provisions that will be useful to practitioners that need to implement GMP-based contracts

Life-Cycle Cost-Based Pavement Preservation Treatment Design

Classic engineering economic theory was developed to furnish the analyst with a tool to compare alternatives on the basis of life-cycle cost (LCC). However, tools used to apply theory to transportation focus on new construction projects with relatively long service lives. These tools do not accurately model the economic aspects of short-lived alternatives such as those that pavement managers must evaluate when seeking the most cost-effective pavement preservation treatment. The field of pavement preservation seeks to keep good roads good, and hence pavement preservation treatments are applied to extend the functional service life of the underlying pavement. No significant research has been done to quantify the actual service lives of the pavement preservation treatments themselves nor has a model been furnished to analyze their LCCs. The paper addresses those two gaps in the pavement economics body of knowledge by proposing a methodology for using field test data to quantify the service lives of pavement preservation treatments for both asphalt and concrete pavements. In addition, the paper concludes that an LCC model based on equivalent uniform annual cost, rather than net present value, specifically addresses the relatively short-term nature of pavement preservation treatments and allows the engineer to better relate treatment LCC output to annual maintenance budgets

Organizational Best Practices for Transportation Projects Delivered Using Alternative Contracting Methods

The use of Alternative Contracting Methods (ACM) to deliver US transportation projects has reached a point where a definitive set of best practices can be identified to leverage the lessons learned by early ACM adopters. The most pressing need is for guidance on how public agencies organize to implement ACMs in a budget-constrained environment where the possibility of increasing the number of public agency engineers is nil. This paper is based on mining the survey response data from 6 National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) synthesis reports on ACM topics and proposes a framework for analyzing ACM practices deemed effective by peer-reviewed research to determine if each practice can be classified as a best practice. Importance index theory provides the analytical foundation for the framework and provides a ranking of candidate best practices in order of each practice’s importance and effectiveness. Nine effective ACM practices were identified and evaluated with only one, “appointing an agency ACM champion,” meeting the objective criteria for a best practice. The paper’s major contribution is to provide the suite of 1 best and 8 effective practices that can be employed when developing the organization for an agency that has decided to implement ACM project delivery.Keywords: Alternative contracting methods, best practices, organizational structure, index number theory

Social Return on Investment as a Metric to Prioritize Use of Accelerated Bridge Construction in Rural Regions

Accelerated Bridge Construction (ABC) techniques have a great potential to minimize the traffic disruptions during the bridge repairs/replacements, promote traffic and worker safety, and improve the overall quality of the built bridges. Despite the major advances in design and construction of ABC techniques, transportation agencies are still hesitant about using ABC techniques largely due to perceived risks during construction and higher initial costs. Furthermore, the current decision process used to prioritize the candidate bridges for this type of construction is oftentimes solely based on metrics such as the average annual daily traffic (AADT). This paper proposes to use a metric employed by the World Bank to prioritize funding for aid in developing countries: social return on investment (SROI). SROI will measure the value of investment in ABC techniques to reduce social, economic, and environmental impacts to the road network users. The Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) completed the replacement of more than 500 bridges as part of the “Safe and Sound” project using the ABC techniques. This paper considers five counties, mostly with agricultural demographics in the state of Missouri, as the case study and estimates the SROI of the utilization of ABC. The results show that SROI provides a holistic measure to incorporate the socioeconomic aspects in the prioritization of the bridges that could benefit from ABC techniques

Feasibility Investigation of Upgrading Gravel Road to Otta Seal Surface: an Economic Analysis Approach

The Norwegian Road Authorities desired that a surface treatment be cost-effective to provide a faster return on investment, perform (as perceived by the road user) in a manner similar to conventional bituminous surfacing, and comply with the following requirements: • Be cheap and easy to implement • Utilize locally-available aggregates • Be impervious to prevent water incursion into moisture-susceptible base material • Be very flexible, durable, and easy to maintain. Such a bituminous surface treatment, referred to as in 1963, and initial field trials were carried out during 1963-1965 in the Otta Valley, Norway. Although Nordic countries, Asia, Africa, New Zealand, and South America have continued to see increasing use of Otta seal (1), its use in the US is currently rather limited due to a lack of knowledge and of the empirical design approach associated with this technique that requires evaluation of trial or demonstration sections before deployment. Minnesota, South Dakota, and Iowa are the only states that have currently completed Otta seal projects in the US, and a summary discussion of MN’s and SD’s experiences with Otta seal is given in this section (2, 3). In this paper, the life cycle cost of surfacing and maintaining an upgraded gravel road to an Otta seal coated surface over a one-mile generic road in Minnesota was evaluated through deterministic and stochastic life-cycle cost analysis (LCCA). Since various road and highway agencies in Minnesota have implemented Otta seal and provided access to the historical cost records needed to complete this study, Minnesota was chosen for a case study for conducting the analysis

A Comparison of Qualifications Based-Selection and Best Value Procurement for Construction Manager/General Contractor Highway Construction

Faster project delivery and the infusion of contractor knowledge into design are the primary drivers for choosing construction manager/general contractor (CM/GC) project delivery. This paper focuses on the use of qualifications-based (QBS) and best-value (BV) procurement approaches, how and why agencies use each, and their associated opportunities and obstacles. Data for this study were obtained from a majority of federally funded CM/GC projects completed between 2005 to 2015. The findings are that BV and QBS projects characteristics and performance have no statistically significant difference. The choice of BV or QBS coincides with the agency’s CM/GC stage of organizational development and influences of non-agency stakeholders on the CM/GC process. When agencies and the local industry are new to CM/GC, they were found to use BV as it is closer to the traditional procurement culture and it is perceived to result in a fair market project price. Alternatively, agencies and local industry partners with an established history of using CM/GC were found to choose QBS. The low level of design at the time of procurement, means that assumptions relating to risk, production rates, materials sources, etc. may be too preliminary to secure a reliable price. The use of BV procurement was found to pose a risk to innovation and increase negotiation efforts. Qualitative trends from the project data, interviews and literature point to agencies using QBS for the majority of CM/GC project and BV on CM/GC projects with lesser complexity or more highly developed designs at the time of selection