As state agencies wait on a possible infrastructure bill from the Biden administration, many are better prepared than they were a decade ago to manage hundreds of billions of dollars in new work.
The Federal Highway Administration incentivized state DOTs to incorporate digital construction technology in 2012 when it established the Center for Accelerating Innovation. The Virginia Dept. of Transportation partnered with the University of Virginia to create the Virginia Transportation Research Council, a centralized research arm with its own budget that allows VDOT to allocate funds and better prioritize projects. In 2017, VDOT, through the VTRC, identified 50 projects with 75 contractor participants statewide that could benefit from tablet-based inspections and standardized PlanGrid, a part of the Autodesk Construction Cloud, as its cloud inspection program on all of them. Success on the inspections pilot encouraged the agency to expand its use of PlanGrid.