Bridge & Infrastructure Scanning in Albany, CA

Albany is barely two square miles, and the freeway takes a sizeable share of it. Interstate 80 and Interstate 580 run concurrent along the western edge, and the Buchanan Street interchange is the city's crossing point: the overcrossing carries Buchanan west over the mainline toward Golden Gate Fields, Albany Beach, the Bulb, and the Bay Trail, and east it becomes the arterial through the grid. Immediately south, the Gilman Street interchange in northwest Berkeley near the Albany boundary was rebuilt and completed in 2025, adding a 230-foot tied-arch bicycle and pedestrian overcrossing spanning both directions of I-80 without a center support. The rail corridor runs along the shoreline below the freeway with its own crossings, and Codornices Creek at the south boundary and Cerrito Creek at the north pass under the street grid in culverts and small bridges the city has to keep rated.

Structures in that band are difficult to survey conventionally and easy to scan. From a control network observed with GNSS and total station, adjusted by least squares with independent checks on NAD83 State Plane and NAVD88, we register every setup and produce coordinate deliverables rather than a self-consistent model. That yields vertical and horizontal clearance computed across the full travelled width from measured deck and soffit surfaces, structural as-builts of bents, columns, girders, bearings, joints, abutments, and wingwalls for retrofit and load rating, arch and ramp geometry captured as surfaces where nothing is straight, and pre-construction documentation of existing condition. On the waterfront, the shoreline is former landfill, and creek headwalls, culvert inverts, and trail structures on that ground benefit from a baseline epoch a later scan can be differenced against.

Field time is short because each scan position takes minutes, so a night window or a shoulder closure is normally enough for a span, and a dimension nobody requested comes out of the archived cloud rather than a second closure. Deliverables are registered E57 or RCP clouds, clearance envelopes, DWG or DXF sections, elevations, and framing plans, surface and mesh models, and epoch comparison exhibits. Local bridges moving through the federal Highway Bridge Program and Caltrans Local Assistance have documentation expectations we scope to. See infrastructure scanning, Albany 3D scanning, and deformation monitoring.