DogLooker691818
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User ID: 2152
DogLooker691818
1yr ago
Signed up to comment on this topic as I'm also in civil (though I'm a project engineer and not design) & it's not a topic people seem to know much about. My agency has in fact recently swapped to drawing directly on satellite. It causes some field issues cause you lose a degree of detail but is a time saver and more importantly lets you interpret a drawing with much more certainty - not typically an issue for a Project Engineer but it can save you a lot of headache with a foreman on occasion. Ultimately though I don't think there's much you can do to make design less annoying - No matter how much you and your interns hate checking quantity or setting elevation, your man hours are always going to be cheaper than a field change and resulting change order. I personally favor more design build work, but that has it's own challenges.
ADA Sidewalk requirements are a huge huge deal and impact road repair and construction more than people realize. Basically most existing sidewalks are not built to current ADA standards, and the feds requirements for this is that it's fine to leave what exists, but if you have a project that those sidewalks are within, you have to bring them to ADA. Typically this will mean curb ramp, but occasionally you'll have to replace entire runs. The issue then is that if you have a city road that's beat to shit, you can mill it off, go down a few inches (or a few feet if you need to do utility work) and repave and it's reasonably fast and cheap and will, as mentioned by OP, last you around 20 years. On the other hand, if you need to replace every curb ramp at every intersection along that run, your costs and time impact will balloon. Depending on how the current curb ramps are built, you may need to redo big chunks of sidewalk behind them to get things flat and wide enough. Worst case you might be talking about relocating utility poles. This leads to situations where road that needs a repair won't get the 2 million dollar job that would get things working good again, and instead your agency will wait till it's truly falling apart and they can take the whole thing apart and redo utilities and signals and etc. for 20 million. That's fine and dandy once it happens, but it means you have a beat to shit road for an extra 10-15 years.
There's a similar issue with overhead utilities, as many municipalities have laws that require you to bury lines if you do a job in the area & underground conduit runs are one of the more expensive things you can do. Alright peace.
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