Project Brief
Following an extensive public engagement process leading up to the launch of the St. Petersburg Coast Bike Program, final siting and engineering had to take place in accordance with Florida Department of Transportation and City of St. Petersburg Standards.
Initiating Phase
Just before the initiation of this project, a stakeholder backed out, leaving me without an engineer in which to complete the work. Even beyond the engineering itself, finding a firm with a week’s worth of billable time open on their calendar within the next 30 days was the most significant challenge presented by this project.
Planning Phase
While working through the challenge of replacing an engineer and dealing with very short project timelines, I was required to start the planning process parallel to stakeholder identification. Examining the budget for the overall program, which at this point had a massive overrun tied to product delays, I determined it best to complete the engineering myself, increasing my workload but keeping the project on schedule.
Executing Phase
At the time of the project, I had reasonably significant experience in the principles of bike share station engineering from previous system launches. I tested this assumption by drawing up plans for one of the more challenging sites that had been selected and met with city engineers to understand what their concerns were and what lines they were comfortable pushing. Fortunately, no formal design guidelines existed, AASHTO or otherwise, and the city of St. Petersburg was willing to experiment where needed. With city approval of my sample location and my Work Breakdown Structure unchanged, I was able to push on.
With a third-party engineer brought in late in the process, I was able to provide documents that thoroughly outlined all site conditions, adjacent traffic speeds, sight triangles, and potential conflicts. This enabled a quick review of locations at a glance by the third party team, allowing for the resiting of a small number of sites without major changes to contract time.
Project Outcome
Through the process of keeping the labor-intensive engineering prep work in-house and by bringing on a licensed engineer to verify my work, stamping the documents, I was able to keep the project on time and reduce the budget by more than $30,000.
Feature Image credits:
- Satellite image: Google
- Striping plan overlay: City of St. Petersburg
- Horizontal annotations and red site triangle: Eric Trull
- Vertical annotations and hashed site triangle (closed driveway): Sprinkle Consulting
