Bridge & Infrastructure Scanning in Novato, CA

Novato sits at a junction of three corridors, and each one brings its own structures. US-101 runs the length of the city and through the Marin-Sonoma Narrows, the sixteen-mile widening program between Novato and Petaluma whose last widened structure was the Franklin Avenue overhead and which reached completion in 2025. State Route 37 begins at the US-101 interchange here and runs east across the wetlands; Caltrans is replacing the Novato Creek bridge on that corridor with a longer, roughly 26-foot-high free span designed for sea-level rise, on a segment that has closed for weeks at a time in wet winters. SMART operates through the city with three stations, at San Marin, downtown, and Hamilton, and crosses Novato Creek downstream of Rowland Way. Behind all of it, the bay margin at Hamilton and Bel Marin Keys is reclaimed ground held by levees and pumps.

Scanning those assets is control work first. We establish and observe a network on NGS and CSRC published stations, work in NAD83 State Plane and NAVD88, adjust by least squares, and check against monuments withheld from the solution. Registered to that network, a scan yields clearance across the full lane or track width, structural as-builts of decks, soffits, girders, bents, abutments, bearings, and joints, and continuous levee crown and slope geometry with cross sections at any station rather than at whatever interval a crew happened to walk.

On young fill and marsh deposits, settlement is the governing question, and it can only be answered by comparison. A registered baseline epoch, repeated on the interval the engineer sets, reports movement as difference surfaces and profiles. City-owned bridges moving through the federal Highway Bridge Program and Caltrans Local Assistance need that same checkable record. Deliverables are E57 or RCP point clouds, DWG/DXF plans, sections, and clearance exhibits, and BIM-ready models; survey filings go through the Marin County Surveyor. See infrastructure scanning, 3D scanning in Novato, and deformation monitoring.