Road Ecology Center

The OTIA III State Bridge Delivery Program is part of the Oregon Department of Transportation’s 10-year, $3 billion Oregon Transportation Investment Act (OTIA) program. In 2003, the Oregon legislature enacted the third Oregon Transportation Investment Act, or OTIA III. The package includes $1.3 billion for bridges on the state highway system. During the next eight to 10 years, ODOT’s OTIA III State Bridge Delivery Program will repair or replace hundreds of aging bridges on major corridors throughout Oregon. Oregon Bridge Delivery Partners (OBDP) is a private-sector firm that has contracted with the Oregon Department of Transportation to manage the $1.3 billion state bridge program. OBDP, a joint venture formed by HDR Engineering Inc. and Fluor Enterprises Inc., will ensure quality projects at least cost and manage engineering, environmental, financial, safety, and other aspects of the state bridge program. Technology is a key factor in the ability to deliver over 350 bridges in eight years. Charged with seeking cost-effective delivery solutions as part of the state’s Context Sensitive and Sustainable Solutions (CS3) initiative, OBDP is developing a suite of tools that will aid the program in its different disciplines. Tools include a mobile, PDA-based field reporting tool, a web-based comprehensive permitting form, and a comprehensive GIS database. Unifying these projects and the program is an electronic document management system (EDMS). This is the program’s document repository. It is webaccessible, extendible to agency and contractor staff, and acts as a “backbone” for other information-development projects. Not only do such initiatives streamline standard delivery practices, but they provide a project database on which metrics can be derived to measure the impacts of the program from a number of perspectives. For example, the environmental database can be queried to measure the ecological “footprint” of one project or all.