Award of Merit - Highway

Reconstruction of the Long Island Expressway

Twenty-seven bridges along 7 mi. of the Long Island Expressway between Van Dam Street and the Grand Central Parkway needed reconstruction and rehabilitation. The job seemed even more daunting, since the LIE is one the most heavily traveled highways in the nation.

The New York State Department of Transportation's resulting $170 million program also entailed new safety concrete barrier medians, wider shoulder areas, improved super-elevation, better signage and lighting, and an Intelligent Transportation System guiding motorists.

At the outset, the project team faced structural, geometric, and operational deficiencies on walls, bridges, and pavement all along the narrow corridor. Such constraints required extensive maintenance and efforts to protect motorists during all project phases. Adding to the challenge was a densely populated community around the work area.

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"This is not your standard project because there were no separate work zones," one judge said.

But the biggest obstacle was that transportation officials wanted three lanes of traffic open in both directions, requiring the project team, led by LiRo Engineers as construction manager, to stagger traffic volume.

The project's sheer complexity encouraged the team to operate in multiple stages. The schedule included more than 3,500 activities and seven B-clock tasks that had associated incentive-disincentive payments. The tasks included repairing substructures, pile driving, extensive painting, and replacing piers, abutments, and decks. The engineering team also designed a multilevel pre-cast concrete post-and-panel retaining wall system.

The bridge reconstruction efforts were extensive, including widening the Queens Boulevard Bridge and replacing superstructures and parts of substructures for six bridges over the highway.

Perhaps the most complex task was replacement of the deck and structural steel on the 58th Street Bridge. The work involved installation of 16 Inverset panels, each 82 ft. long. Since this portion required some traffic shut down, transportation officials granted one weekend for the work. The team developed an hour-by hour schedule detailing every construction task, along with written contingency plans.

"You had to build the service roads [and] build on the main line, all with only four weekend days of service outage," said one judge. "Logistics management in that environment is a big challenge."