I-680 Express Lane Project Alleviates Bay Area Congestion

When WSP USA’s Eric Lilly arrived early one morning to the construction site on Interstate 680 (I-680) in Contra Costa County, California, he noticed something extraordinary: there was no traffic.

“Where there’d been bumper-to-bumper traffic crawling by at five miles per hour the day before, there were now maybe two or three cars passing by per minute,” Lilly said.

It was March 2020, and while he knew about the County’s shelter-in-place order—and had implemented COVID precautions on the job—it was still a shock to see the empty highway.

And a source of inspiration.

“I thought, with such low traffic volumes, maybe Caltrans will let us start taking lane closures during the day,” recalled Lilly, resident engineer and project manager for WSP on the 17-mile-long widening and renovation project.

Dave Pezel, project manager for civil contractor Bay Cities Paving and Grading, readily agreed. So did the client—Contra Costa Transportation Authority (CCTA)—and Caltrans, the state highway agency.

“Bay Cities could now work extended shifts without having to be off the roadway before the morning commute,” Lilly said. Shifting demolition and other noisy work from nighttime to daytime hours also eased the noise stress on nearby residents.

This was all a boost for the I-680 High-Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) Lane Completion and Express Lane Conversion Project, which was designed with a goal of alleviating a heavily congested area through five miles of highway widening, 17 miles of HOV lane conversion to express lanes, bridge widening, signage updates and other structural and traffic routing improvements.

By creatively using the circumstances of the pandemic to accelerate construction, the project team shifted what was already a remarkably smooth-running highway expansion and upgrade project into an even higher gear. The job arrived at the finish line a full year ahead of schedule, in August 2020; and it came in $2.8 million under budget.

This dual achievement on the I-680 project led Lilly and his team to recognition as the winners of WSP’s Project of the Year Award in the $3 million to $15 million category.

While the unexpected daytime lane closures provided a welcome boost, finishing the project ahead of schedule and saving the client significant costs were as much a result of rigorous advance planning, collaborative management and a team of contractors and stakeholders that pulled together “as if they were all working for the same company,” according to Lilly.

When Lilly and his team at WSP wrote their proposal to CCTA to perform construction management for the I-680 project, they knew that other projects to add express lanes to Bay Area highways were over budget and had fallen a year or more behind schedule. They were determined to buck that trend. So was CCTA.

When WSP was awarded the construction management contract, CCTA asked the team to use paperless construction administration (eConstruction) for transmittals, submittal reviews, approvals and management of project documents. Even in the Bay Area, this is still unusual in construction.

“Typically, everything is still paper based,” Lilly said. “Everything is printed out, three-hole-punched and put in binders that just sit on a shelf.”

The WSP team first road-tested eConstruction on a small roadway extension project for another client in the East Bay. When they implemented it on the I-680 project, “there was a small learning curve at the beginning because nobody had done it before,” Lilly said. “But within a couple weeks, everybody was happy to have a paperless workflow.”

With their constructability review at 65 percent design, the WSP team “looked for ways to improve contract documents to avoid issues we’d seen on other projects,” Lilly said. And on a site visit, they made an important catch: “For one of the retaining walls, some of the cast-in-drilled hole piles were specified in locations under utility lines, where drilling rigs couldn’t operate.” The design team, led by HDR, quickly adjusted the plans.

Lilly and his team also studied what went wrong on an earlier Bay Area express lane project that was notorious for finishing two years behind schedule.

“A significant part of the problem had to do with poor coordination between the civil contractor and the toll system integrator,” Lilly said. Trouble-shooting this issue in advance, Lilly and his team organized the civil and toll system work in stages, with the civil contractor completing one section before moving on and making way for the toll system integrator.

The WSP team facilitated frequent communication with the HDR design team, Bay Cities and other stakeholders, especially the client, CCTA, Caltrans and the Bay Area Infrastructure Financing Authority (BAIFA). Weekly meetings were held to review progress and identify needs, and Lilly and Pezel from Bay Cities talked at least once a day outside already planned meetings.

“As the construction manager, our responsibility is to keep the contractor moving,” Lilly said. “And whenever there’s a delay in responding to the contractor’s requests for information or clarification, they lose time, and the project falls behind schedule. So, we were very efficient in getting responses back to them. The designers were equally responsive to us when we needed to discuss some issue or ask for a revision.”

He added that field staff and inspectors had similar relationships with the contractor’s field staff, so a lot of issues were resolved in the field before they had to get bumped up to his level.

“Anybody who’s been on this side of a big project as resident engineer knows that you can’t necessarily dictate how the project is constructed,” Lilly said. “But with the improvements we made to the contract documents during the constructability review, we can guide the contractor to construct the work in the most efficient manner. We still provide direction when things aren’t clear and try to avoid delays but fortunately, we had an excellent team of people pulling together in all the roles.”

In addition to Lilly, lead WSP staff included Bart Littell, principal in charge, and Chelsey McGrew, assistant resident engineer. Other team members included: Elayne Navarrette, project administrator; Indy Chadha, structure representative; Scott Frenette, scheduler; and Matt Bohlander, Jeff Cowling, Jeff Douglas, David Ho, Bret Parrick, and Barry Semnani, inspectors.

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