ADA Ramp Surveys in Pinole, CA

Pinole's old town is the hard case. The historic commercial block on San Pablo Avenue and around Tennent Avenue was built when a storefront simply sat where the grade left it, so entries are raised a step or two above the walk, thresholds vary door to door, and the cross streets climb away from the creek flat steeply enough that a compliant landing has to be engineered rather than poured to match the sidewalk. The city has been rebuilding this ground: its sidewalk rehabilitation program has removed and replaced downtown curb ramps for ADA compliance, and street rehabilitation on Tennent Avenue between San Pablo Avenue and Railroad Avenue has carried sidewalk and ADA curb ramp repair with it. Owners renovating those storefronts face the same questions on the private side of the property line.

For a historic entry, the useful survey is a measured record of exactly how far off the existing condition is. We capture the entry, threshold, landing, and the walk in front of it as a single measured surface tied to control, then report the change in level at the threshold, the landing length against the 60-inch minimum, the running slope of any ramp against the 1:12 limit, and the cross slope against 1:48, which the California Building Code Chapter 11B expresses as 2 percent. Half an inch of level change decides whether a bevel is enough or a ramp is required, and that is a measurement question, not a judgment call. On the hillside cross streets the same approach handles the harder geometry, where holding a 2 percent cross slope across a walk on a 10 percent street means the whole panel has to be modeled.

Deliverables are slope and cross-slope exhibits, threshold and level-change tables, spot elevations, and CAD files, with the point cloud archived for later sections. See ADA compliance surveys, Pinole 3D scanning, and Pinole as-built surveys.