ACTT Activities Update
Accelerated Construction Technology Transfer (ACTT) has emerged as a viable tool available to transportation agencies as they strive to address tax payers' chief complaints, namely, work zone congestion and excessive construction time.
The ACTT process is implemented by conducting a 3-day workshop that focuses on a specific project. Workshop participants are drawn from a 175-member national resource pool comprised of 11 different skill sets to evaluate all facets of the project to identify ways to help achieve project goals/objectives, primarily, reduction of construction time. The primary objective of the ACTT initiative is to share national knowledge and expertise to demonstrate a new approach to highway construction and ultimately, promote the accelerated construction concept.
To date, 34 ACTT workshops have been successfully completed. ACTT projects have varied in scope, complexity, and cost, ranging from $1 million to over $3.5 billion. Despite their differences, ACTT projects have one thing in common; they all involve construction of an existing facility under traffic. Reduced construction time along with improved work zone safety and minimized community/socio-economic impacts are common goals. Each workshop has resulted in a number of recommendations, many of which have been accepted by the host agency as practical, feasible, and viable solutions. Many of the recommendations could be applied to other projects, both locally and nationally like:
- Minimizing construction impact on traveling public
- Pre-casting, pre-fabrication, and off-peak hour erection of bridge components.
- Optimizing completion of secondary activities such as utility relocations, retaining walls, noise walls, and other ff-line work in advance of any mainline activities restricting through lanes.
- Minimizing construction time through measures like:
- Overlapping design with construction.
- Innovative contracting methods such as A + B, D/B, Incentive/Disincentive, combining contracts, and Lane Rental specs.
- Optimizing mainline closure.
- Use of accelerated material testing methods, maturity meter, air void analyzer, and ground penetrating radar.
- Use of permanent and portable TMS, QuickZone analysis of the control plan, ITS, motorist advisory system (VMS), and websites.
- Establishing a communication team, with single point of contact. Also, highly educating the public about the project, developing a sense of ownership/partnership for the public, identifying and celebrating significant project milestones with the public.
- Establishing an incident management plan including spec related wrecking service.
Fact sheets and workshop reports are produced at the completion of each workshop and are made available to all involved in highway construction as part of the promotional outreach effort.