Leading engineering and planning consultancy Michael Baker International (MBI) has been awarded a US$1.5m contract to provide on-call civil engineering and planning services to restore and enhance roadways across Oakland, California.
MBI’s services that will be provided on these much-needed paving projects will improve public safety and enhance the city’s transportation network by repaving streets to remove potholes, rebuild cracked and deteriorating sidewalks, implement traffic-calming measures, and bicycle and pedestrian safety improvements.
The contract was awarded in response to the passage of Measure KK, a US$600m infrastructure and affordable housing bond measure passed by voters in November 2016, which prioritized the upgrade of Oakland’s approximately 831 miles (1,337km) of roadway.
Of the total finance, US$350m will help fund paving projects that involve the application of the latest pavement preservation techniques, including reconstruction, mill and overlays, and sealing; and green infrastructure elements, such as cold-in place recycling and full depth reclamation to reduce the city’s carbon footprint.
The Michael Baker team will provide civil and pavement engineering services to meet the city’s planning, design, schedule and budget needs for on-call assignments. As part of the contract, MBI will use its innovative vehicle-mounted mobile lidar and Pavemetrics’ laser crack measuring system (LCMS) technologies to capture high-resolution point cloud data to map the city’s roadways and identify pavement distress points.
This integrated, rapid, single-pass data collection method will deliver cost and time savings, as well as the most accurate and complete picture of roadway conditions to the Oakland authorities. Work is already underway on this contract, which runs through July 2020. MBI is also working on several other transportation projects in California, including Phase 2 of the Cow Camp Road Design in South Orange County, and the SR-91 Westbound Widening Project for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro).
“In today’s world of ever-increasing demand on transportation and multimodal infrastructure, we are uniquely positioned to deliver innovative transportation planning, pavement rehabilitation and traffic improvements,” said Tad Stearn, Michael Baker International’s Northern California Office executive.
“Our team demonstrates how we make a difference by executing the most economical and practical approaches to pavement management and preservation using the latest technologies.”
