ADA Ramp Surveys in Kensington, CA

Kensington has no city hall, so the sidewalks and curb ramps along the Arlington Avenue shops, around the Colusa Circle storefronts at the El Cerrito line, and in front of the community district's park and community center are maintained through Contra Costa County. County Public Works in Martinez runs the curb ramp program and the countywide ADA transition plan that sets priorities for the unincorporated communities, and federal law treats a resurfacing project as an alteration, which pulls the curb ramps at the paved block into the work. Anyone designing, bidding, or closing out that work needs measured slopes rather than assumed ones, and so does a commercial owner on Arlington reworking an entry, or a CASp inspector documenting a path of travel to a shop that sits three steps above the walk.

Cross slope is what makes Kensington difficult. The 2010 ADA Standards and California Building Code Chapter 11B allow a ramp running slope of no more than 1:12 (8.33 percent) and a cross slope of no more than 1:48, which the CBC states as 2 percent, and landings must be at least 60 inches long. On a frontage that falls steeply along its own length, holding 2 percent across the walk while the street drops is a design problem, not a paperwork problem, and it is decided by a few tenths of a percent. We measure it from a surface. A Trimble scanner or total station tied to survey control records the ramp, the flares, the landing, the gutter, and the run of sidewalk as thousands of coordinated points, so a slope is computed across the whole panel instead of wherever a two-foot level happened to sit. That also documents the detectable warning placement and the transitions at driveways and the public stairways that link Kensington's streets.

You get annotated slope and cross-slope exhibits, spot elevations, and CAD deliverables, plus the registered point cloud when the design team wants it. We document conditions; the CASp or architect makes the compliance call. See ADA compliance surveys, Kensington 3D scanning, and Kensington as-built surveys.