I don't think they have a real need to know, but that is just my opinion. To my knowledge, they have never stated a particular rationale for that aspect of their model of E-plans distribution.
In general terms, here are what I think are the possible motivations operating in states which don't allow anonymous download:
* Reliable electronic distribution of addenda. If the user is allowed to come in and download plans anonymously, the state DOT can't be sure that the user will have access to any changes made by addendum after advertisement. Since any bid which does not expressly acknowledge all addenda is automatically ruled non-responsive, many state DOTs think it increases their chances of getting competitive bids if they make it hard for contractors to ignore addenda. In the case of MoDOT, for example, whenever I download a project, I get all change notifications for that project by email from the time of download until bid opening.
* Document control. If you know who downloaded the plans, you know who has access (at least at first hand) to them. States which consider structure plans to be sensitive (which is by no means all of them, but is still a worryingly large minority) tend to attach great importance to this point.
* Facilitating coordination and transparency in bid preparation. Contractors are typically required to state whether they will be bidding as a prime contractor or subcontractor when they order plans and a bidding proposal. This preference, together with the contractor's business name and contact details, go on a planholders' list, which is usually the first point of reference for a prime contractor looking for subcontractors to handle certain aspects of a turnkey project, or for subcontractors looking to get a piece of the action from a prime contractor. If a person is forced to be listed on a planholders' list in order to obtain a copy of the construction plans, this introduces a "push" factor into the process and makes certain types of collusive behavior easier to detect.
There are good counterarguments to all of these reasons, which is why a narrow majority of states operate an opt-in system which allows some anonymous online access to the plans but requires you to sign up for the planholders' list if you want to bid (either prime or sub). Oklahoma DOT puts the plans online, for example, but advises you to order the paper plans so you get on the planholders' list and thus receive all addenda. If you are interested in Michigan DOT, you can sign up for an Eproposals account which gives you online access to all their proposals and plans on login; you have to click "Add me to the planholders' list" for a given project if you want to be on the list for that project.
In the case of MoDOT, you can obtain a planroom account by declaring yourself either a "Contractor" or a "Vendor." I declared myself a "Vendor." When I order plans from MoDOT's planroom (which is actually run not by MoDOT itself but rather by Indoxservices, a blueprint company based in Denver and St. Louis, under contract to MoDOT), I have the option of ordering them on paper, for which there is a sliding charge based on sheet count, or electronically, for which there is no charge but for which I still have to go through a full E-commerce transaction. Indoxservices at least allows me to opt out of being put on a public planholders' list, which prevents me from having to field calls from suppliers who are, e.g., interested in quoting me prices for pretensioning cable so I can put together a bid for the Noland Road bridge.
The advantage of ordering on paper is that all the sheets are sorted correctly--essentially as they are listed in the sheet list for the project. If you order electronically, however, you get one file per sheet, and sheets for multiple jobs sort by sheet number rather than job number because the filename always begins with the sheet number rather than the job number. So you get Sheet 1 Job 1, Sheet 1 Job 2, Sheet 1 Job 3, Sheet 2 Job 1, . . . Part of the reason for this is that the sheet filename usually matches the MoDOT CAD filename and MoDOT has a tendency to design each job on its own, and then mix and match jobs later to make a contract. (I have tried to "fix" this by using a file renamer utility to "move" the job number to the front of the filename. But guess what? Lots of job numbers in MoDOT sheet filenames have typos in them.)
When you finish your order, you have to wait for a ZIP file to be assembled with all the sheets you ordered. The ZIP file is always made to order, since Indoxservices doesn't have prefabricated ZIP files lying around for people like me who always want the full Monty, and if you try to download the ZIP too early, you get all sorts of error messages. When I work with Indoxservices, I try to do it outside regular business hours to avoid competition for disk and CPU time on their server.
When the ZIP comes from Indoxservices, the sheet files are all encrypted PDF with a constant-length garbage string just before the .pdf extension. This means plans have to be read a sheet at a time with no ability to premerge on the fly for easy viewing. MoDOT plots with layers and does E-signatures now, so when you load a sheet file in Acrobat, you get all kinds of dialog boxes dealing with E-signature validity. It is such a hassle to deal with these that I just take a quick look at the sign panel detail sheets (which nearly always have the designation "Form D31" and quite often the strings "SN" [for signing] and "D31" in the filename), and then file and forget the project. I have 138 MoDOT projects (about 9.5 GB worth) I have filed and forgotten in this way since the letting of August 21, 2009. Maybe I will go through them all in five years when the tarball reaches 500 projects/50 GB in size.
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Topic: I-49 Coming to Missouri (Read 332194 times)