With space at such a premium that a parking lot was converted into a construction staging site, two design-build teams are squeezing improvements and a new terminal into San Diego International Airport, one of the world's busiest single-runway airports.
Photo by Tudor Van Hampton Chicagos $1-billion Red Line rehab falls on the heels of a $530-million modernization of its Brown Line, which wrapped up in 2009. The Red Line is one of the busiest transit routes in the U.S. A $1-billion program to modernize Chicago Transit Authority's Red Line—the backbone of the city's century-old urban rail and one of the busiest routes in the U.S.—is about to get under way.The long-overdue project will rehab Chicago's most traveled passenger rail, which serves 240,000 daily riders. The train stations are outmoded, and track deterioration has prompted slow zones that bog down
Related Links: Midwest Floods of Summer Hit U.S. Railroad Network The joint-venture Iowa team of Peterson Contractors Inc., Reinbeck, and Reilly Construction Co. Inc., Ossian, established one goal in late September when it started rebuilding Interstate 680 near Crescent: get the flooded highway repaired and reopened as quickly as possible. The contractor's $19.2-million contract came with a $2 million bonus if all four lanes of the 2.56-mile segment were open by Nov. 20. The team finished the job in 33 days, well ahead of the owner's Dec. 23 deadline."Everybody went to work," said Cork Peterson, Peterson vice president. "Everybody had
Related Links: Quick Flood Repairs Earn Contractors a Bonus The Missouri River flooding closed railroads as well as highways last summer, but U.S. railroad companies stayed a step ahead of the floodwaters, building levees and elevating tracks to keep their trains running.Norfolk Southern Railway and Union Pacific Railroad raised track in Kansas and Missouri major floods within the past two decades, but the 2011 flood was so severe that they were again forced to elevate roadbeds.“Due to major roadbed work after the 1993 flood and additional work after the 2007 flood our track did not require any additional raising,” said
The critics have called it "the bridge to nowhere." It has gone through over a decade of delays and setbacks. But the 1,722-ft-long, 295-ft-tall Galena Creek Bridge, one of the costliest, most controversial projects in Nevada's history, is finally nearing completion.Crossing a small creek in a rocky, rural patch of northern Nevada about 20 miles southwest of Reno, it will be both the country's longest cathedral-arch bridge and the linchpin of a $600-million Interstate 580 extension between Reno and Carson City.The 8.5-mile-long, six-lane freeway bypasses a busy, accident-prone stretch of U.S. Highway 395—which runs through Pleasant Valley, a small, unincorporated
Courtesy of Capital Beltway Express LLC Virginia's $2.1-billion Capitol Beltway Express is near its midway point. Public-private partnerships are gaining an extra boost in the United States as cash-strapped states increasingly grapple with how to address critical public-works infrastructure needs amid dwindling public funds. And the U.S. could learn a thing or two about P3 deals from its northern neighbor.That's the consensus of construction professionals with mature experience in P3 delivery systems who gathered at a recent related conference in Washington, D.C. Canada is widely seen as a decade ahead of the U.S. in P3 delivery of major highway and
PHOTO COURTESY OF GO BUILD ALABAMA Go National Alabamas image initiative, supported by CURT, is nearing adoption in two more states. What's top of mind for one of the biggest construction project owners in the U.S.? Attendees at the Construction Users Roundtable national conference, held in Chandler, Ariz., on Nov. 7-9, got insight into Intel's strategy to execute $3.5 billion worth of construction in 2011.Tim G. Hendry, Intel's procurement and fabrication vice president, said the challenge for the world's largest semiconductor manufacturer is to keep its four-year lead over competitors. "With speed comes challenges," he said. Intel is experiencing "steeper,
Why are industry best practices underused, and how can associations collaborate to increase their implementation?A web-based framework should be developed in which groups can share best practices as well as promote opportunities to improve, suggests the National Construction Forum, a group of 15 associations and eight universities, convened by the National Academy of Construction in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 16-17.The forum's goal is to create a national voice on major industry issues by integrating and leveraging the efforts of key organizations."The idea is to start small but to grow to include every industry organization," said James G. Slaughter, president of
MAP COURTESY OF SONOMA-MARIN AREA RAIL TRANSIT North of San Francisco, the North Bay's first commuter rail line is inching toward construction. Meandering through the hilly suburbs of Marin County and the farms and vineyards of Sonoma County, the new rail line is designed to relieve pressure from the jam-packed 101 Freeway, providing a less stressful ride for North Bay commuters. As the Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit system moves ahead, other California rail projects—such as the $100-billion San Francisco-toAnaheim high-speed rail line—are hitting some speed bumps.Seed MoneyLast month, the Bay Area's Metropolitan Transportation Commission released $33.1 million to the Sonoma-Marin
As London’s main international airport at Heathrow nears full capacity, momentum is growing in the U.K. for a major new hub in the Thames Estuary. London Mayor Boris Johnson has been lobbying hard for an estuary airport for two years. Recently, architectural heavyweight Sir Norman Foster proposed a rival $80-billion estuary project that includes high-speed rail, tidal power and a major new utilities and data spine.Foster’s Thames Hub would be built at the end of the Isle of Grain, Kent, some 55 kilometers east of central London. Over a third of the 40,000-hectare airport would be on land reclaimed, with
RSS
