ADA Ramp Surveys in Pittsburg, CA

Pittsburg’s accessible-route problems concentrate where the oldest pavement meets the oldest buildings. Along the Railroad Avenue corridor through old town, storefronts were built to a sidewalk that has since been patched, re-poured, and re-graded, so door thresholds, sidewalk cross slopes, and the little transitions in front of entries rarely match anything on a plan set. Away from downtown, the industrial waterfront and the newer neighborhoods climbing south toward the hills raise a different set of questions: large parking fields where stall and aisle slopes have to hold 1:48 in every direction, and connecting walks that cross driveways and loading aprons. Federal law treats street resurfacing as an alteration, so curb ramps at the affected intersections have to be brought up to standard when paving happens, and Contra Costa County Public Works runs its own annual curb ramp installation and upgrade program on county roads alongside whatever the city repaves.

The numbers that decide these questions are small. Ramp running slope is 8.33 percent maximum, cross slope 2.083 percent under the 2010 ADA Standards and 2 percent under California Building Code Chapter 11B, and landings have to be at least 60 inches long. A two-foot smart level reports one line across one part of a surface that is almost never planar, so a wheel track a foot to the side can fail while the reading passes. We measure the ramp and the route as a surface instead. A Trimble scanner or total station collects the ramp faces, flares, landing, gutter, and adjacent sidewalk in one visit, and slopes come out of that surface across the full width, at whatever spacing a reviewer asks for, without a return trip.

Deliverables are exhibits people can act on: slope and cross-slope plans keyed to spot elevations, ramp-by-ramp tables, flare and detectable-warning notes checked against Caltrans Standard Plans A88A and A88B for right-of-way ramps, and a layered DWG base map for whoever designs the fix. We document conditions; the CASp inspector or architect makes the compliance call. See ADA compliance surveys and 3D scanning in Pittsburg.