Transportation Troubleshooting: Advancing Transportation Delivery in the Digital Age

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Transportation Troubleshooting: Advancing Transportation Delivery in the Digital Age

Paula Hammond on May 9, 2024 - in Articles, Column

If consulting engineers and public infrastructure managers took a vote today on whether we should rapidly adopt digital delivery, the tally would be near unanimous in favor. But if we also asked them to define exactly what digital delivery means for their agency and the best ways to use it efficiently, responses would be all over the map.

Theory vs. Practice

There’s no arguing that digital delivery, in which computerized data replaces traditional paper documents, is an evolutionary leap over traditional design, construction and asset-management systems. Similar to BIM, digital delivery for infrastructure digitalizes all planning, design, engineering, construction and asset data, making them more accessible and easier to track as well as optimizing workflows to get more done more efficiently.

Computer datasets often are used to populate 2D and 3D models that allow stakeholders to better visualize proposed projects—sometimes using augmented reality or similar technologies—and enable project teams to specify and coordinate work more accurately.

At least, that’s how digital delivery is supposed to work. In practice, the true benefits of this evolutionary leap are proving difficult to navigate. Carefully mapped pathways to digital delivery sometimes are delivering the opposite of what users hope: more costs and more-cumbersome processes.

Moving Away From Clay

Some rough patches are to be expected enroute to this entirely new way of doing business in the engineering and construction profession, which is changing traditional methods that have existed for centuries. As my colleague Chris Harman remarked on a recent conference call, “Since ancient Mesopotamia, builders have been scraping plans onto clay bricks. Essentially, we’re still doing things that way, except on paper.”

Harman is a WSP senior vice president for transportation project delivery, and with his international experience helping public infrastructure managers move toward digital delivery, he has seen firsthand how difficult and complex this evolutionary step can be. While respecting client confidentiality, Harman told me about some common problems he’s seeing on the march to digital delivery.

“With rapidly evolving software capabilities, it’s possible to compile and aggregate an enormous amount of data points into project and asset models,” says Harman. “But then you have the challenge of parsing and sorting that data for the deliverables you want—for example, better management of traffic-signaling equipment. That could require hiring more people and purchasing more consulting services—the opposite of making processes more cost-effective.”

Another common challenge is classifying, categorizing and naming all the assets in ways that aren’t overly complex yet still provide the results DOTs, utilities and other asset managers need, such as more-targeted and efficient tracking of age, condition, maintenance history and lifecycle status of assets.

With pressure from political appointees and public stakeholders to finally get beyond those clay tablets and enter the digital age, agency staff may feel pressured and make hasty decisions around software procurement or commit to digital delivery milestones without adequate preparation. For example, although 3D modeling with LiDAR data capture can create compelling and useful visualizations, they also require much work to tease out useful data.

Harman offers a few “smart engineering” recommendations:

• Know and explain the pain points you want to mitigate and improve through digital delivery. This information, he says, will better enable managers, IT staff and consultants to shape a digital delivery strategy that delivers benefits at reasonable costs.

• Clearly define your goals. If you’re interested in better tracking of drainage systems or crash barriers, what will you do with the information?

• Only commit to software after you’ve done the initial work to scope your program. Otherwise, you may spend your budget trying to “crowbar” the software to fit your needs. You may not need complex 3D models at the end of a project, just better spreadsheets of data extracted from those models—at least to start.

• Start with a limited pilot phase and be willing to not have all the answers. Begin by setting a course toward your destination and be willing to course-correct. You can’t reach your destination unless you strike out toward it.

With digital delivery, consulting engineers and our clients in public infrastructure have a vast new set of tools and processes that can work wonders—if we’re patient with the learning curve and strategic in our deployment.