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Hudson Valley Transportation Management Center
A Smart Building for
Intelligent Roads
by Dave Platter
As John J. LiMarzi describes it, the new Hudson Valley Transportation
Management Center, which opens in July in Hawthorne, N.Y.,
is like an air traffic control tower, only without the airplanes
and or tower.
"Traffic management is air traffic control for the ground,"
said LiMarzi, manager of Intelligent Transportation Systems
at the New York State Department of Transportation.
Rather than direct jets, the primary mission of the $50 million
building is to improve the congested traffic of Hudson Valley
roadways such as Interstate 95, Route 287 and the Taconic
Parkway.
"Nonrecurring incidents like accidents are the biggest
delays we have" on the roads, but with as many as 80
people in the building from state and local agencies and police
forces, the Transportation Management Center will learn quickly
about accidents and breakdowns, LiMarzi said.
The center will be plugged into a network of roadside cameras,
changeable signs, emergency communications networks and 911
calls. And, it will be able to quickly direct the right combination
of ambulances, fire trucks, tow trucks and police to resolve
bottlenecks as soon as they occur.
When construction is complete, the inside of the building
will look something like NASA Mission Control. A 15- by 20-ft.
array of 36 projection screens will cover one wall of a room,
and the room itself will be filled by computerized traffic
operations consoles.
Shepherding the project through the research, design and
construction phases has occupied nearly six years of LiMarzi's
professional career. About half of that time was spent visiting
and learning from similar centers around the country.
"We designed their mistakes out of our building,"
he said.
Just preparing the site for construction involved removing
an entire hillside, 32 ft. high and 150 ft. wide. That translated
into approximately 4,000 trailer truck loads.
"We trucked out approximately 100,000 cu. yds. of earth,"
said Robert Bauco, project manager for the job's construction
manager, Jacobs Facilities Inc. of New York, N.Y.
The hill was taken apart 4 ft. at a time, starting at the
top. After removing the first section of soil, the team drove
specialized soil nails, some 40 ft. long, back into the newly
revealed earth.
The nails functioned as tie-backs, helping hold the soil
bank in place. A colorized concrete mixture was sprayed over
the vertical surface to finish it. Then, the next tier of
4 ft. was dug out and the process repeated itself.
Building the soil nail wall cost about $1 million.
While the center is named for its most important day-to-day
use, it is also home to a New York State police barracks and
a 911 cell-phone call center.
Foundations were already being laid when a substantial change
was made to the design - the addition of subgrade, bunker-like
emergency management centers for both New York State and Westchester
County.
Handling that change of scope without losing control of the
budget and schedule was the biggest challenge of the project,
Bauco said. "There were approximately $15 million of
scope changes while we were under construction," he said.
"We added 20,000 sq. ft. to the building."
To accommodate the building's increased size, all the systems
that make a building work had to be upgraded, including the
uninterrupted power source, boilers, chillers and other mechanical
and electrical systems.
Rather than halt the entire project while it was redesigned,
Jacobs Facilities decided to fast track the job, beginning
work on each successive component as soon as that portion
of the redesign was complete. Work on the foundations resumed
first.
"We were designing portions of the job and bidding them
out while we were already under construction," Bauco
said. Even so, the massive change of scope delayed the job
by about nine months.
Had the team waited for the entire redesign to be complete
before resuming work, "it would have taken twice that
long," Bauco added.
Sometimes, the delays were intentional, in particular those
for advanced communications, display and computer equipment.
"The technology in that type of an industry changes dramatically
in two years," Bauco said.
Since the installation of this equipment is one of the last
things on the project schedule, Jacobs Facilities was able
to postpone awarding the relevant technology contracts until
August, 17 months after the first contracts were awarded.
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