Belgian highway construction documentation now online

[J N Winkler]

I stumbled across this page:

https://enot.publicprocurement.be/enot-war/preSearchNotice.do

It is a search engine for contract notices on the Belgian federal public-procurement website.  Some of the tender notices are for highway construction, with attached documentation that can be downloaded, e.g. publication number 2013-502037 (N453 bridge replacement over the N60 western bypass in Oudenaarde).  Some subnational units in Belgium have their own public procurement platforms, but it appears to be a requirement that they co-list at least some of their projects (I'm not sure whether it is all of them or just the ones valued in excess of a threshold amount) on the federal website.

My search tips:  "Search publication in"--choose "Both."  ("Free market" I think means not free market in the economic sense, but rather the tender notices that are mandatorily co-listed.)  "Publication in status"--choose "Active" (I am not sure whether documentation is still available for archived projects).  "Language"--choose "All languages."  (If you load the page in English you will be offered "English" as an option, and it will lead to empty results since of course no Belgian government agency will advertise in English.)  There is an option to search by Common Procurement Vocabulary (CPV), but it is a waste of time because the system won't accept asterisked CPVs (you need to be able to do a complete search on CPV 45233* in order to be sure of retrieving all highway-related contracts).  "Works" as a contract type is overbroad, and will pull in over a thousand hits for building construction.  I have found it yields the highest signal-to-noise ratio to search by specific agency, the one having trunk-road responsibilities in Flanders being called "Agentschap Wegen en Verkeer" (I do not know if it has a direct Wallonian equivalent).

Engineering drawings, when they are available, are usually either plotted PDF or monochrome TIFF (scanned).

Edit:  With this facility, Belgium joins France, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, and Poland in providing reasonably easy access to engineering drawings for highway projects.

[Chris]

Unfortunately Belgian road (freeway) construction is not very active. They opened their last new freeway 13 years ago. Other projects appear to be in perennial state of delays.

If you are interested in Dutch national road and motorway plans, visit www.centrumpp.nl, this is the public participation website of the Netherlands. All official documents, such as environmental impact assessments and project drawings are published there (they have an archive as well). An example is the A9 Badhoevedorp bypass project. Drawings are chiefly found in the "ontwerp-tracébesluit" (design record of decision) and "tracébesluit" (final record of decision).

[J N Winkler]

Unfortunately Belgian road (freeway) construction is not very active. They opened their last new freeway 13 years ago. Other projects appear to be in perennial state of delays.

Yup, I figured the Belgians were probably in asset-preservation mode at present.  My main objective behind searching this website was to find advertised sign replacement contracts.  The closest I came was the N6/N453 Oudenaarde job and the sign layout sheet was not pattern-accurate, nor did I find sign panel details either in the drawings set or in the accompanying A4-sized documentation (loosely equivalent to an American proposal book).

Denmark and France (in that order) have proved to be the European countries for which it is easiest to find sign replacement contracts.  The Danes do very large signing jobs with pattern-accurate, full-color sign panel detail sheets.  French sign replacement contracts are usually smaller but a few, such as the signs contract for the N21 near Tarbes and Lourdes, or the A31/A33/A330 signs replacement in Alsace-Lorraine, were quite large (over 200 and 400 pages of sign detail sheets, respectively).  Spain used to do very large sign replacements as well but that more or less ended when the economic crisis started to bite in mid-2009.

If you are interested in Dutch national road and motorway plans, visit www.centrumpp.nl, this is the public participation website of the Netherlands. All official documents, such as environmental impact assessments and project drawings are published there (they have an archive as well). An example is the A9 Badhoevedorp bypass project. Drawings are chiefly found in the "ontwerp-tracébesluit" (design record of decision) and "tracébesluit" (final record of decision).

I haven't gotten into the Dutch stuff yet because it is my understanding that the Dutch, like the British, prefer to do contracts which combine engineering and construction.  What I would like to do is to find smaller contracts for asset preservation only, which might have sign layout sheets and sign panel detail sheets put online as part of the tender documentation.  Is this available?