In a recent American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) article on accelerated bridge construction, CHA’s Mike Culmo shares insights on why the approach continues to gain momentum. An excerpt is provided below. The full article is available on ASCE’s website.
Traffic is a universal inconvenience.
Whether someone is on the way to work, picking the kids up from school, or driving to a new travel destination, traffic can negatively impact people’s day-to-day lives in many ways.
And major construction can make delays much worse. In the case of bridge construction, road closures and long detours can add another layer to road congestion.
But engineers are always looking for ways to minimize these impacts.
Accelerated bridge construction, known as ABC, is “bridge construction that uses innovative planning, design, materials, and construction methods in a safe and cost-effective manner to reduce the on-site construction time that occurs when building new bridges or replacing and rehabilitating existing bridges,” as defined by the Federal Highway Administration.
ABC began gaining traction across the United States in the early 2000s and is now widely used. And it has definitely lived up to its name.
Using ABC, engineers can repair or replace bridges in a matter of weeks, days, or even hours, dramatically reducing on-site construction time and length of delays. And for longer-term projects, ABC can reduce project timelines by months or years.
There are many techniques that fall under the ABC umbrella, including prefabricated bridge elements and systems, meaning the use of components produced off-site; slide-in construction, in which a new bridge is built adjacent to an existing bridge and moved into place after construction is complete; geotechnical solutions to prepare sites for construction; and different types of contracting methods.