ADA Ramp Surveys in Piedmont, CA

Piedmont is small, hilly, and heavily treed, which is an unusually difficult combination for accessible routes. The city's Public Works department oversees sidewalks, street trees, and street improvements and runs an ongoing sidewalk repair program, and the city has pursued an ADA transition plan approach to prioritizing barrier removal in the right of way. On the ground, the barriers here are rarely the classic missing curb ramp. They are warped and lifted panels under mature street trees, curb returns on curving streets where the approach grade eats the ramp's slope budget, and long private entry walks up to houses set well above the street.

Slope on this kind of concrete cannot be honestly reported from a two-foot level. A single panel between two roots may read compliant in one orientation and fail badly in another, and a curb return on a curving hillside street is a warped surface by construction. We scan the corner or the walk, model the surface, and compute running slope, cross slope, and vertical level change at every joint, so the engineer sees the distribution rather than a sample. On steep approaches the scan also shows where grade could be absorbed, which is the information the fix actually depends on.

The same method applies to civic and institutional sites: entrance ramps and landings, exterior routes across sloping grounds, accessible parking stalls and aisles, and thresholds at older buildings. Deliverables are per-ramp and per-panel slope exhibits, spot elevations on a CAD plan the contractor can build from, and the registered point cloud when the design team wants it. We document built conditions; a CASp inspector or architect issues the compliance opinion. Related Piedmont work: 3D laser scanning, topographic surveys, and as-built surveys.