Grade your state's DOT

[CentralCAroadgeek]

Well, I forgot to mention that button copy signs would be better if Caltrans actually washed them once in a while. Probably because of the budget, they don't clean them. At least they're there though...

[kkt]

I don't think the Golden Gate or Bay bridges are signature spans.  They were made using the least expensive type of bridge for the site.  A signature span is going out of its way to do something more expensive than it has to be just to be showy.  The Golden Gate has some decorative touches in the lighting and design of the columns, but a suspension bridge is the most cost effective type of bridge that could be made on that site.

By that criterion, I am not convinced that the self-anchored suspension span of the Bay Bridge is a "signature span" either.  I am aware that it was developed as an alternative to retrofitting the existing cantilevered truss (an option which Caltrans at the time acknowledged would not meet "lifeline route" standards), to replacing it altogether with a segmental concrete bridge which was widely criticized as a "freeway off-ramp into the sky," or building a cable-stayed bridge.  IIRC the "freeway off-ramp" was clearly the inferior option from the standpoint of navigation because it would have resulted in a lower and narrower envelope for ship transit.

Jerry Brown demanded the "signature span" at a time when a choice had to be made among three options:  the plain concrete bridge, the cable-stayed bridge, and the self-anchored suspension bridge.  Taking seismic performance and navigation considerations into account, the cable-stayed bridge and the self-anchored suspension bridge were clustered tightly together in terms of cost and performance, but the self-anchored suspension bridge was $30 million more expensive at a time when the total cost of the east span replacement was still only around $1 billion--a difference of about 3%.

It should have been obvious that the self-anchored suspension bridge would have much higher chance of cost overruns as an unusual design.  It makes one suspect that CalTrans gave it a low estimate on purpose in order to make more work for themselves.  The simple concrete bridge need not look like a freeway off ramp; the 1980s Dumbarton bridge is concrete and it looks pretty good. 

I'm also skeptical of the need for a high bridge for navigation.  Somehow we fought WW II with the old east span of the Bay Bridge, much lower with closely-spaced piers.  But now that the Navy has left Alemeda and the shipping business has gone to Stockton, we need a higher east span?  High clearance ships can continue to go under the west span.

[J N Winkler]

It should have been obvious that the self-anchored suspension bridge would have much higher chance of cost overruns as an unusual design.  It makes one suspect that CalTrans gave it a low estimate on purpose in order to make more work for themselves.  The simple concrete bridge need not look like a freeway off ramp; the 1980s Dumbarton bridge is concrete and it looks pretty good.

I don't think the cable-stayed option would necessarily have been cheaper or less complicated simply because it was more familiar.  It was taken as a given that any replacement bridge (as opposed to a seismic retrofit) would be designed to meet lifeline standards, which--if memory serves--calls for no interruption of traffic service longer than fifteen minutes in the immediate aftermath of a maximum credible earthquake.  Cable-stayed bridges in general are very common; cable-stayed bridges designed to this standard are very uncommon.

It is also my understanding that the push for the SAS came from the stakeholders, not from Caltrans Structures Division, which tends to undercut various flavors of the bureau-maximization argument, though the orthotropic bridge deck was considered innovative and the Caltrans engineers responsible for it were happy to take credit for it in published papers.

I'm also skeptical of the need for a high bridge for navigation.  Somehow we fought WW II with the old east span of the Bay Bridge, much lower with closely-spaced piers.  But now that the Navy has left Alameda and the shipping business has gone to Stockton, we need a higher east span?  High clearance ships can continue to go under the west span.

It is true that the navigation envelope of the bridge as currently planned is an improvement on that which already existed with the original east span, and by itself would not justify the costs now associated with the SAS.  Indeed, Google Maps does not show any ferry routes which pass under the east span, and for ships coming from the open seas through the Golden Gate bound for ports in the East Bay, routings under the east span are typically much less direct than ones under the west span.  (The agreed clearance for the new east span is actually slightly lower than that of the existing span, because of the deck thickness of the new span, Wikipedia says--see link below.)

However, the dimensions of the navigational envelope were agreed with the Coast Guard and the permit was issued at a much earlier stage of the process, when the costs associated with the various options were understood to be much lower.  When the first $1.4 billion bid came in for the SAS superstructure contract in 2004, the concrete viaduct and cable-stayed bridge options were both reconsidered and found to be so close to the SAS in cost that re-opening the Coast Guard permitting process would generate delays whose cost would more than offset any savings.  (Neither alternative could be built under the existing permit because neither was compatible with the navigational envelope specified in the permit.)

Wikipedia's article on the east span replacement is a pretty good road-map to the various controversies:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_span_replacement_of_the_San_Francisco_%E2%80%93_Oakland_Bay_Bridge

It reminds me of something I had forgotten--the cost increases were driven by sharp rises in steel and concrete prices.  This means that none of the replacement options, including the supposedly more fiscally responsible concrete viaduct, would have avoided massive cost overruns unless it were finished before the price increases took hold.

One could argue that if all the parties involved had agreed promptly on the viaduct instead of holding out for various cable-stayed or suspended options and thus creating delay, it would have been possible to build it before prices took off in 2004.  I feel, however, that this scenario requires too many things to go exactly right.  The approach viaduct which has already been built as part of the new east span is essentially two-thirds of the viaduct option, and at the time of contract award it was understood that it would take six or seven years to build it.  Assuming that a similar construction period would apply to a viaduct replacement for the whole span, this means that the construction contract for it would have had to be let in 1997 to avoid cost overruns from material prices.  I don't think the FEIS was even signed until 1998, and then additional time would have been required for final design; consensus did not begin to coalesce around replacement (as opposed to retrofit) until about 1996.

[Occidental Tourist]

Well, I forgot to mention that button copy signs would be better if Caltrans actually washed them once in a while. Probably because of the budget, they don't clean them. At least they're there though...

[national highway 1]

OK, since no-one from outside the 50 States has critiqued their state's DOT, I'll kick us off:
New South Wales Roads and Maritime Services (RMS), formerly the RTA (Roads and Traffic Authority)

Route Markers
Generally, the route markers are the right specs and correct numeral widths. However there are a few occurrences with unsigned duplexes, poorly executed route marking changes, important unnumbered corridors, pointless 'Tourist Drive' routes and incorrect shields.
Rating: A-
Guide Signs
Clear, concise and consistent and well executed signage is one great thing about NSW. A few old faded 'black signs' exist around the Newcastle, Southern Highlands and Country areas. Signage replacements happen every 15-20 years. NSW likes to use coverplates (greenout plates) to alter sign information to save costs. However there are a few non-standard signs installed by local councils in regional areas. School zone signs have been made more prominent in recent years by fluro yellow and flashing 40km/h signs.
Rating: A
Pavement
Used to use concrete from the 1920s to the 1960s, then had a mix of asphalt and concrete in the 1980s. 1980s concrete on some of the regional freeways (F3 Freeway, Hume Hwy) is deteriorating, but being patched over with newer concrete. 1990s and early 2000s were mainly asphalt, which has been progressively repaved over with newer asphalt. In some mountain areas, there is a sprayed asphalt type of gravel/aggregate which is very noisy to drive on, used in slippery areas
Currently, there have been a few repavings over the past few years, on newer projects such as the Pacific Hwy and Hume Hwy, there is high standard concrete/asphalt dual carriageway suitable for 110km/h (70mph) speeds.
Rating: B+
Line markings
Generally OK, however there are few places which need restriping and/or new reflectors.
Rating:B
Congestion
Mainly concentrated in the Sydney metro area, where the city has grown radially and with most toll roads transferring to electronic tolling, and so therefore most radial and circumferential arterials are clogged heading in and out of Sydney. Due to reasonably poor public transport and most toll roads transferring to electronic tolling , more Sydneysiders are resorting to car-based transport. A few road projects have made to combat this.
Rating: C
Construction Zones
Well signed and well equipped, however due to a lack of funding, the government has either scaled down projects or deferred them. Projects have a long EIS or along period of planning before being given the green light.
Rating: C
Bridges, Tunnels and Road related infrastructure
Generally well executed, with good guardrails and barriers/bollards and other traffic calming measures (speed humps and traffic islands). Retaining old lift/opening bridges and stone/wooden bridges is a good thing, too. Tunnels are well lit and ventilated, however incident response could be better. There are a few problems with ventilation of the M5 East Tunnel.
Rating: B
Website
Well organised, with projects separated by region, however not consistent with project maps and PDFs. Does have construction images, however there aren't that many archives. Not updated frequently. Submissions used to go through a long process, previoulsly there could be sent through to the Dept of Planning, Transport or Roads. Since the merger bewteen Roads and Maritime Services, the govt has decided to be more committed and more focused to the needs of the state
Rating:D

Overall Rating: B

[on_wisconsin]

A = Construction plans available online at letting without URL hiding or JavaScript involvement; anyone may download them free of charge without registration; archived more or less permanently

B = Construction plans available online at letting, possibly with URL hiding or JavaScript involvement; anyone may download them free of charge without registration; not archived

C = Construction plans available online at letting, possibly with URL hiding or JavaScript involvement; registration required to download; may not be archived

D = Construction plans in electronic format distributed solely through CD or online services that require payment; may not be archived or available in arrears

F = Construction plans not available electronically at all


WI  A (Was D under old system of CD distribution)

Actually, Wisconsin keeps its plans online for only about 6-10 months, for example they recently purged all the plans from 2011 on there FTP server.

[J N Winkler]

WI  A (Was D under old system of CD distribution)

Actually, Wisconsin keeps its plans online for only about 6-10 months, for example they recently purged all the plans from 2011 on their FTP server.

WisDOT has had online plans for only a year now, and their procedures are still evolving--for example, the online plans are now in their third "home" and the advertisements page was recently reorganized to have separate pages for each letting.  (I am not a fan of the new system, BTW, because all of the bid advertisements are now placed under the same filename, advertisement.pdf, rather than under a filename containing the letting date, e.g. adv20120710.pdf.  I liked the old system better because it allowed me to use string extraction on the filename itself to obtain the YYYYMMDD part of the WisDOT call number for each project.  I can still automate this part of the process but now I have to write new code to do URL parsing on the advertisement pages.)  So things are still in flux.

I have been retrieving online plans from state DOTs for over 10 years now.  In that time, my experience has been that as state DOTs gain more experience with putting plans online, and as unit costs for storage and hosting drop, they decide it is easier to keep plans online indefinitely rather than to spend staff time and risk public annoyance on periodic purges.  For example:

*  NCDOT has had plans online (initially on a view-only basis using a very bad ActiveX plugin) since about 2002, has supported downloading since 2003, and now has an online plans archive which goes back to mid-2004.

*  Illinois DOT has had plans online since 2004 and had its first purge (which removed several of the 2004 lettings) just last year.

*  Ohio DOT was probably the first state DOT to put plans online, initially on a Digital Paper server which never worked very well and was closed for new lettings around 2001, with Web access being withdrawn several years later.  Since about 2002 Ohio DOT has hosted plans on a new Digital Paper server, which initially worked no better than the old one but has improved considerably with recent upgrades and still has plans for projects which were uploaded in 2002.

*  Caltrans started putting plans online in 2001 and initially had a two-tier mechanism:  plans would initially be uploaded to Office Engineer's /project_ads_addenda/ folder on the Caltrans web server, and then three months after award, the project would be removed from /project_ads_addenda/ and then uploaded to a Digital Paper archive server at hqidocs.dot.ca.gov.  Digital Paper worked no better for Caltrans than it had for Ohio DOT, so public access to hqidocs.dot.ca.gov was withdrawn after several years.  Although Caltrans Office Engineer still has language on its website saying that plans are liable to be removed from the website three months after award, in actuality no purges have happened in the recent past and /project_ads_addenda/ still has projects with advertisement dates going back to summer 2003.  Some of these are quite large, such as the Bay Bridge SAS superstructure contract (04-0120F4), or the I-215/SR 60/SR 91 reconstruction and widening (08-334844).  As a general rule, plans for a given project are left alone unless they are deleted and substituted with new plans for a readvertisement (so, for example, the SAS plans now available for download correspond to the second advertisement, not the original one).

So, TxDOT (which has had plans online for as long as Caltrans--since about 2001) is fairly unusual in having a six-month limit on availability and purging promptly at the six-month mark.  I have faith that the folks at WisDOT will wake up to the advantages of letting old plans "sleep" on the server.

[mjb2002]

South Carolina Department of Transportation

Highway construction

The highways in SC are in better shape than I expect, considering that the state has been cutting SCDOT's budget to the barebone. However, the LAURENS ST bridge in Aiken crumbled and that will not be completed until summer is over.

But, it does little to affect the grade in this category.

Grade: A

Regulatory signs

The regulatory signs are, for the most part, compliant already. SCDOT has been replacing regulatory signs at least four years BEFORE the 2009 MUTCD (which formerly had hard deadlines contained in it) came out.

Grade: A

Warning signs and plaques

The warning signs in most areas around South Carolina have kept up to the regulatory signs. But, not quite fast enough.

Grade: B+

Guide signs and overhead guide signs

With the exception of casing, guide signs of destinations and political boundaries have been maintained about as good as the warning signs. For the counties that have changed the names of places into mixed-case, I have not seen a political boundary sign formatted correctly (the word "Town Limit" / "City Limit" on these signs is still in all upper-case letters, rendering it non-compliant). But since so few municipalities have used the new political boundary signs, it will not count against them this time.

Grade: B+

Overhead Street Name signs

These signs are in poor shape in most of the counties that have them (15-30+ years old). Hard to see at night.

Grade: D-

Street Name signs

These signs are in even worse shape than their overhead sisters. At the time of SC's adoption of the 2009 MUTCD, only 4 of the 46 counties had compliant signs (Aiken, Orangeburg, Pickens and Spartanburg), and signs in exactly 50% of the counties in SC failed the new minimum letter height requirements (6 inches upper-case, 4.5 inches lower-case) that went into permanent effect on January 10 (the updated version of the 2009 MUTCD do not eliminate this deadline, since it had passed prior to the manual's revision). Since then, Greenwood County, Edgefield County and my home county of Barnwell have only begun changing their signs to mixed-case within the last two months. The street name signs in SC overall are not even close to satisfactory in my book.

Grade: F

Construction zones

Still to many casualties in construction zones and a very high percentage of worker deaths were completely avoidable by travelers. SCDOT and the state need to really crackdown on motorists violating the rules of construction zones.

Grade: D

Congestion

Not a big problem outside of Aiken, where people are turning onto EAST PINE LOG RD to avoid the light at CHARLESTON HY's westernmost terminus, thereby making EAST PINE LOG RD even more congested than it already is. If this was based solely on the experience in Aiken, it would be an F. But, there is not a problem with congestion outside of Aiken, Charleston, Columbia, Florence, Greenville, Greer, North Myrtle Beach, Orangeburg, Rock Hill or Spartanburg in SC.

Grade: C+

Web page

The web page has a lot of information about projects. SCDOT also provide online maps for all communities and counties. The only problem? Signs and markings are not available on their web page - and that is a big problem considering that there are some signs (like the state highway sign) that is exclusive to SC.

Grade: C

Overall Grade: C