Best Practices Team

Team Focus

• Develop a proposal to expand Practical Design and Value Engineering

On November 22, 2005, a group of transportation stakeholders met to brainstorm the topic of Best Practices.  The group included representatives of industry; both supply and design, as well as MoDOT personnel. 

The meeting began with a recap of MoDOT’s practical Design efforts and experiences over the past year.  A great deal of value has been added to MoDOT’s program and a great deal of revenue has been saved as designers strive to meet, but not exceed the needs of the traveling public.

It is clear the DOT has experienced a period of great innovation, but it believes there is much more that has yet to be uncovered.  The potential for additional value was discussed and the members offered many topics for discussion.  The following is a list of those topics along with MoDOT’s plan of action for each.

Best Practices for Achieving Projects of Great Value

1.Suggestion: Where runoff hydraulics are concerned, choose the correct design storm event for the project at hand.

   Action: MoDOT will make the standards for hydrological design more flexible.  Instead of giving a single design frequency that    must be followed regardless of location, a range of events will be used to achieve practicality according to the individual setting.  In this manner, a bridge or culvert that has performed well for the past several years need not necessarily be expanded upon its rehabilitation. 

This new policy will go into effect on January 1, 2006.

2.Suggestion: Develop a forum wherein best practices and practical suggestions can be shared publicly.

   Action:MoDOT will investigate and choose software for the publication of its engineering policy that will allow comment and discussion.  The Wikipedia®, for instance, is an internet based information database that not only presents policy information in a direct, organized, and easy to use format, but also allows users to comment as well as view the comments of others.

Over the course of the next year, MoDOT will begin to add its engineering policy to a web based system that will allow user discussion.

3.Suggestion: Take a page from the “Wal-Mart” playbook.  They size their facilities to handle the traffic that exists 350 days of the year.  Overcrowding during the relatively few days of the Christmas shopping rush may seem inconvenient, but the customers receive more value from a store that is able to maintain a lower overhead a vast majority of the time.

   Action: MoDOT will adopt a policy of designing to fulfill only the purpose and need of the corridor, no more and no less. The DOT is aware that purpose and need of a highway corridor involves more than traffic volume alone.  For this reason, policy will be based in the desired operational level of service (LOS) as opposed to just volume.

Policy will encourage the appropriate balance between access and mobility for according to the intended purpose of each project.  When the desired LOS requires a four-lane facility, it will be designed as an expressway unless freeway is mandated. Two-way left-turn lanes (TWLTL) will once again be permissible where practical and passing lanes will be used in areas where poor LOS is a result of inability to pass safely.

This new policy will go into effect on January 1, 2006.

4.Suggestion: Shutting down facilities should always be considered and done more often.

   Action: Over the past five years, MoDOT has used full road closure as a traffic control option more and more frequently.  As familiarity with this method grows, the DOT is able to apply lessons learned to future endeavors.  At the present time, there is even ongoing discussion about closing Interstate 64, a major St. Louis artery, while it is rebuilt.

Engineering policy developed over the course of next year will encourage full road closure whenever it can add value to a project.

5.Suggestion: Consider Design-Build on more and smaller projects.

  Action:  Design-Build (DB) has been against Missouri Statute until very recently when the legislature allowed MoDOT to pilot three DB projects.  Two projects are currently being tested with the third to be named later.  Upon the eventual success of the pilot, the DOT will report back to the legislature and seek clearance to experiment further.

The eventual goal of the pilot exercise is to have DB available as a tool to apply to very specific projects.  Possessing this ability will allow MoDOT to accomplish its goals better, faster, and cheaper.

Two Design-Build pilot projects are ongoing.

6.Suggestion: Consider public-private partnerships (P3) to facilitate more MoDOT Projects.

   Action:  MoDOT recognizes the need to constantly strive for more innovation and efficiency in delivering the program.  P3 has been evaluated as one such innovation and the potential for private entities to invest money in public infrastructure appears to have great potential.   Because of this, MoDOT is seeking authority within the Missouri Legislature to allow P3 in the state, specifically, to fund a new Mississippi River bridge in St. Louis.

MoDOT is actively seeking statutory approval for P3 by the end of the 2006 legislative session.

7.Suggestion: MoDOT should be more open to innovation, even at a higher initial cost, if it helps the bottom line.

   Action:  For slightly more than one year, MoDOT has added value to its program through the use of Practical Design.  In short, Practical Design is the practice of designing projects to serve their intended purpose and need, no more and no less.  Openness to innovation is inherent to Practical Design and in the past year alone, MoDOT has embraced innovations from unsealed pavement joints to prefabricated bridges systems.  In that same year, the DOT saved nearly $500 Million on its program.

Engineering policy developed over the course of next year will encourage innovation by restructuring all engineering policy around Practical Design.

8.Suggestion: Reward consultants who strive for innovation with additional work instead of arbitrarily “spreading the work around”.

   Action:  MoDOT believes the reward for good work is more work.  Consultant performance evaluations are currently required for all projects and are used in future consultant selections.  Starting in 2006, a section will be added to the evaluations for proficiency in practical design.  MoDOT is also in the process of creating an incentive/disincentive plan for selected projects to ensure timely plan delivery and accurate estimates.

9.Suggestion: Implement a “Knockdown” policy in which a firm is retained to pursue property damage claims such as struck bridges, guardrails, and signs.

    Action: MoDOT’s Risk Management Division currently handles these cases in-house with increasing success, due, in part, to increased attention having been focused on the problem.  The growth in returns can also be attributed to some of the recovered funds being returned to the districts in which the accidents happened.  This encourages the district to initiate the claims that might have gone unreported in the past.  The investigation process has also been streamlined by the acquisition of direct access to the Highway Patrol’s Accident Database on the part of MoDOT.

Last year, the DOT was able to recover about $3 Million in property damage claims.  The program is ongoing.

10.Suggestion: Consider electronic bidding.  It has proven to result in substantial monetary savings.

     Action: MoDOT has analyzed the time and monetary savings associated with electronic bidding and found both to be worthy of pursuit. The primary savings to the DOT will presumably lie in the areas of staff time and publication costs.  The Associated General Contractors (AGC) of Missouri support MoDOT’s efforts as the electronic bidding process has the potential to greatly increase their bidding efficiency.

An electronic bidding system with a hard-copy backup will be operational by late 2006 and a totally electronic system will be in place by early 2007.

Best Practices Team Members

Chair: Joe Jones – MoDOT, Technical Support Engineer

573-751-3813  Joseph.Jones@modot.mo.gov

Other Members:

Bill Ankner - MTI

Ben Bielsky – Metal Culverts, Inc.

Bob Goodwillie – Delich, Roth & Goodwillie, P.A.

Dan Meckes – Crawford, Murphy & Tilly, Inc.

Ed Reichert – Contech, CPI

Tom Stevener – Horner & Shifrin