Carbon Footprint Cost Index: A Pavement Case Study

Public projects for pavement and pavement maintenance are often based on budgets set by capital improvement budgets. A better way for determining the cost of sustainability in infrastructure costs is needed. The capital budget limitation causes an issue for the owner. The municipality must construct projects with a focus solely on initial cost and cannot include sustainability requirements due to the perceived additional cost. Sustainability can often be viewed as subjective. Utilizing the carbon footprint as the basis for the decision creates a much more objective evaluation of sustainability in pavements. A case study illustrating a carbon footprint cost index is presented

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

A Comparative Analysis of Alliancing and Integrated Project Delivery on Complex Projects: Parallel Systems Sharing a Common Objective

Relational contracting methods are a natural evolution from the many versions of project delivery that have been developed over the past two decades aimed at increasing the amount of integration and collaboration among mega-project stakeholders. Alliancing was born in the 1990’s in North Sea oilfields and imported down under to Australia and New Zealand where it has used to deliver over 300 complex projects. The litigious environment present in the North American construction sector led project owners to implement partnering programs to enhance the quality of relationships on projects of all sizes delivered using the full spectrum of delivery methods. Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) made its appearance in 2002, employing nonbinding partnering program objectives into multi-party relational contracts. While developed separately, alliancing and IPD share the same objective: an environment where decisions are made on a “best-for-project” basis and all stakeholders share the both the pain and the gain associated with ultimate project performance. This paper chronicles the evolution of project delivery methods, as well as their successes and failures. The paper finds that each approach has been tailored to maximize collaboration within each culture’s legal and business environment. It also finds that alliancing appears to offer the most advantages and has a well-documented record of success. Lastly, the paper recommends that the commercial building project IPD currently used in North America needs to be revised to increase its potential on complex megaprojects

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