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Traffic congestion had been steadily increasing on one of North America's busiest traffic corridors throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. The client, faced with the challenge of providing a workable solution in a tight time frame, and with a shortage of public funds, was committed to a transportation project that would involve an innovative design-build-finance-operate partnership.
Earth Tech, as part of a team of leading highway design engineering firms, used its expertise to facilitate land negotiations during the critical property acquisition phase. The Company was responsible for the value engineering process, which identified over $250 million in cost-avoidance opportunities and allowed the project to be affordable and deliverable in the allocated time frame. Critical to the value engineering design was an effective estimation of traffic volumes.
Earth Tech also designed 20 km of freeway, 23 bridges, 10 interchanges and completed a toll and revenue forecasting study to assess staging and phasing of the project and determine ultimate roadway configuration. Services provided by Earth Tech included planning, value engineering, transportation engineering, structural engineering, air quality assessment and program management.
This 69 km multi-lane all-electronic toll highway has helped alleviate traffic congestion problems in a busy metropolitan area. The innovative approach, for a project that would prove to be one of the largest road construction and civil engineering projects in North America, reduced construction time by 15 years and construction costs by an estimated $300 million, compared to building the highway with tax dollars.
