The City of San Antonio won’t soon forget its first time using design-build on a transportation project. What it received was a $68.3 million four-lane roadway that will help traffic flow in a busy part of the community.
Hausman Road, which officially opened with a ribbon-cutting last week, was a two-lane roadway that connected Loop 1604 and Interstate 10. A Sundt team widened the 3.4-mile stretch between the highways to four lanes, plus a center turn lane, and constructed five new bridges.
The city chose design-build because it provides a single point of responsibility for designing and constructing the project, offering significant cost and time savings, innovative solutions, improved communications and outstanding quality.
“It’s a pioneering project for a local government,” Sundt Area Manager Abel Ortiz-Monasterio said.
We incorporated two Bexar County road projects on Hausman Road at two different stages of design and all public utilities work along the roadway under a single design-build contract. Instead of several construction schedules, phasing, detours and inconvenience, there was one seamless approach by Sundt’s design-build team.
“This was a great decision by these public owners that created success for stakeholders living along the corridor and traveling Hausman Road each day,” said Sundt Corporate Strategic Business Officer John Carlson.
The city’s original plans included a 94-foot-wide typical roadway section with each of the travel lanes measuring 12 feet in width. Sundt and its design team recommended reducing the roadway width to 86 feet by narrowing the lanes to 11 feet.
The design-build team also suggested combining the two, five-foot-wide bicycle lanes originally planned for either side of the reconstructed roadway into one, 10-foot-wide shared use bicycle/pedestrian path along one side of the road that will be separated from vehicles. In addition to being safer, the new configuration allows the path to connect more easily to an established network of the city’s hiking and biking trails. Together, the proposed changes significantly reduced the amount of right-of-way property the city had to acquire and, along with other innovative approaches, yielded nearly $3 million in savings.