Bridge & Infrastructure Scanning in Oakland, CA

Oakland carries more structure per mile than any other East Bay city. The MacArthur Maze, where I-80, I-580, and I-880 fold into each other at the west end, is a stack of ramps and connectors on separate substructures. I-880 runs the length of the flatlands as the replacement for the collapsed Cypress viaduct, and Caltrans rebuilt its 23rd Avenue and 29th Avenue overcrossings in 2018 to fix the nonstandard geometry there. I-980 cuts a trench through West Oakland under a run of city street overcrossings. Across the Lake Merritt channel the city owns the 7th Street, 10th Street, 12th Street, and Embarcadero crossings, several of them rebuilt in the last decade. Alameda County operates the Park Street, Miller-Sweeney, and High Street bascules over the estuary from the Oakland bank, BART runs on aerial guideway through East Oakland, and Union Pacific and BNSF overheads cross the truck routes into the Port.

Scanning suits that inventory because the alternative is people in traffic. From a control network observed with GNSS and total station, adjusted by least squares and checked independently on NAD83 State Plane and NAVD88, we register every scan position and hand the engineer real coordinates rather than a self-consistent model. From it come vertical and horizontal clearance surveys computed across the full lane width, structural as-builts of bents, columns, girders, bearings, joints, and abutments for seismic retrofit and load rating, deck and soffit surfaces for overlay and rehabilitation design, and pre-construction documentation of what a contractor found on arrival. Where scour, settlement, or bearing migration is the question, the first scan becomes the baseline and later epochs are differenced against it across whole surfaces instead of a scatter of prism points.

Deliverables are E57 or RCP point clouds, clearance envelopes and diagrams, DWG or DXF sections, elevations, and framing plans, surface models, and epoch comparison exhibits, with stamped products where a licensed deliverable is required. City-owned bridges moving through the federal Highway Bridge Program and Caltrans Local Assistance have documentation requirements we scope to. See infrastructure scanning, Oakland 3D scanning, and deformation monitoring.