ADA Ramp Surveys in Martinez, CA

Martinez puts two of the harder accessibility problems in the same few blocks. The first is the historic downtown grid platted along the Carquinez shoreline in the 1800s, where storefronts on Main, Ferry, Court, and Berrellesa sit behind raised entries, sloped vestibules, and sidewalk panels that have been patched around utility work for a century. The second is the civic center: this is the county seat, so the courts, county administration, and city offices draw daily public traffic that has to arrive on a compliant route from accessible parking and from the transit side near the Amtrak station. City street work downtown has included ADA curb ramp installation with curb and gutter repair on streets through the old grid, and Contra Costa County runs both an adopted ADA Transition Plan and an annual curb ramp program on county-maintained roads, so both jurisdictions generate ramp inventory and closeout work.

Historic downtowns fail differently than new construction. A ramp built to standard can still land at a sidewalk panel that has heaved, and the compliant part of the route ends at the panel, not at the ramp. Our approach is to measure the route continuously rather than sampling it. Scanning or dense total-station observation gives a surface, so running slope is computed across the actual ramp run, cross slope across the actual panel, and the landing at the door is evaluated as a plane instead of one level reading. Entry thresholds, the item most often missed on old commercial buildings, get measured elevations rather than estimates.

Typical deliverables are a per-ramp or per-route slope exhibit, colorized cross-slope maps, spot elevations at every landing and grade break, and CAD for the design team. We document what is built; the compliance opinion belongs to the CASp or architect. For interior and facade documentation on the same building, see Martinez as-built surveys and Martinez 3D scanning.