ADA Ramp Surveys in Vallejo, CA

Vallejo’s accessibility work divides along the same line the city does. Downtown, the Georgia Street corridor and the blocks running toward the ferry terminal are an old commercial grid on ground that climbs away from the waterfront, so sidewalks carry real longitudinal grade and the cross-slope limit gets squeezed at every driveway and curb return. The City handles ADA and Section 504 through Public Works with a designated ADA/504 Coordinator, and pedestrian safety projects such as the HAWK intersection improvements have included construction of ADA curb ramps at previously unsignalized crossings. Across the causeway, Mare Island is a different scale of problem: a former naval shipyard now converting to civilian and public-serving uses, where the accessible route to a reused building can run hundreds of feet across historic concrete, rail-embedded paving, and grades set for shipyard operations rather than pedestrians.

Long routes over old surfaces are precisely where sampled measurements fail. A route can pass at every point a level was set and still contain a 40-foot stretch above the running-slope limit between those points. We measure the whole route as a surface instead, tied to survey control, so slope is computed continuously and the exhibit shows where a route actually exceeds 1:12 running or 1:48 cross slope. On Mare Island the same capture also gives the building and site geometry that adaptive-reuse design needs, so one mobilization serves both the accessibility exhibit and the as-built model.

Typical deliverables are colorized slope and cross-slope maps over the route, per-ramp exhibits with running, flare, landing, and gutter values, spot elevations at thresholds and grade breaks, and CAD or a registered point cloud. Records for Vallejo run through the Solano County Recorder and County Surveyor in Fairfield. See also Vallejo as-built surveys and Vallejo 3D scanning.