ADA Ramp Surveys in Richmond, CA

Richmond runs an ADA curb ramp upgrade program that builds and retrofits ramps according to priority criteria from the city's ADA transition plan, including requests from people with disabilities, routes serving government facilities, transportation corridors, places of public accommodation, and employment centers, and it coordinates those upgrades with public works projects and the city's pavement rehabilitation program. That coordination is the important part for contractors, because federal law treats resurfacing as an alteration: when the paving crew finishes a street, the curb ramps on it are in scope, and someone has to demonstrate that the finished geometry works.

Richmond spreads that work across very different environments. Macdonald Avenue and the downtown blocks are dense pedestrian corners with utility conflicts. Point Richmond's historic commercial buildings sit behind raised entries and thresholds where an accessible route has to be threaded through a narrow public sidewalk without altering the facade. The industrial and port-adjacent areas add wide truck aprons, rail crossings, and long routes between parking and building entrances. Around Richmond's transit hub, high pedestrian volume lands on exactly the corners with the least room to work.

We measure by scan or dense total-station observation and compute running slope, cross slope, flare slopes, landing dimensions, gutter counter-slope, and detectable warning placement from a modeled surface tied to control, so a result can be re-checked years later against the same data. On private property we document entrance ramps, thresholds, exterior paths of travel, and accessible stalls and access aisles. Deliverables are annotated slope exhibits, spot elevations on a CAD plan a contractor can build from, and the registered point cloud on request. We document conditions; a CASp inspector or architect issues the compliance determination. Related: 3D laser scanning in Richmond and Richmond as-built surveys.