Bridge & Infrastructure Scanning in Berkeley, CA

Berkeley's structures cluster on the west side, where the city meets the freeway and the shoreline. The Gilman Street interchange in northwest Berkeley, near the Albany boundary, was rebuilt over four years and completed in 2025, and it added a bicycle and pedestrian overcrossing with a 230-foot tied arch spanning both directions of I-80 without a center support. A mile south, the City of Berkeley Eastshore Pedestrian Overcrossing has carried people and bicycles over fourteen lanes to the Marina since 2002 on a basket-handle steel arch with a 279-foot main span. Between and around them sit the University Avenue and Ashby Avenue interchanges, the Ashby connection carrying State Route 13 into the city, the Union Pacific corridor along the Eastshore with its street and trail crossings, and the culverts and small bridges where Codornices and Strawberry Creeks pass under the grid.

Arch and truss geometry is exactly where hand measurement stops working, and where scanning earns its place. A tied arch, a basket handle, or a curved approach ramp has no dimension you can tape; it has a surface, and a surface is what the scanner returns. We observe a control network with GNSS and total station, adjust it by least squares with independent checks on NAD83 State Plane and NAVD88, and register every setup to it, so the cloud carries coordinates an agency can act on. From there we produce vertical and horizontal clearance across the full travelled width, structural as-builts of arch ribs, hangers, deck, girders, bearings, joints, abutments, and bents, deflection and camber comparisons against design, and baseline epochs for later differencing. On the flat western edge, where the ground is filled bay margin and the Hayward fault sits three miles east, a documented baseline is worth having before anything visibly moves.

Deliverables are registered E57 or RCP clouds, clearance envelopes, DWG or DXF sections, elevations, and framing plans, surface and mesh models for complex geometry, and epoch comparison exhibits. City-owned crossings advancing through the federal Highway Bridge Program and Caltrans Local Assistance have their own documentation expectations, and we scope to them. See infrastructure scanning, Berkeley 3D scanning, and deformation monitoring.