3D Scanning in San Mateo, CA

San Mateo has rebuilt a lot of itself around the railroad. The city has three Caltrain stations, Hillsdale, Hayward Park, and downtown San Mateo, on a line that has run electric trains from San Francisco's 4th and King to Tamien Station in San Jose since August 2024. The 25th Avenue Grade Separation Project, a $205.9 million job, raised the tracks and slightly lowered the road at East 25th Avenue, opened new east-west connections at 28th and 31st avenues, and rebuilt Hillsdale as an elevated station that reopened in April 2021. Next to it, the former Bay Meadows racetrack, which opened in 1934 and ran its last races in August 2008, has become an 83-acre mixed-use, transit-oriented neighborhood. New construction near transit is where scanning earns its keep before the finishes go in: we verify anchor bolts and structural steel to 1/8 inch from the scan, with total station check shots on any bolt group near tolerance, and map slab deviation and levelness.

Downtown is the opposite problem. San Mateo incorporated in 1894, and its downtown core holds more than 800 shops and restaurants, many in buildings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Those buildings have been re-fronted, divided, combined, and upgraded for decades, so a tenant improvement, seismic upgrade, or change of use starts with finding out what is actually there. A scan captures the storefronts, upper floors, stairs, and structure in a single visit, and the plans and sections drawn from it line up with each other because they come from one registered cloud. The cloud is delivered with the drawings, so the next question from the engineer or the plan checker can be answered from the data rather than from another site visit.

Contour Survey is based in Lotus, in El Dorado County, and works up and down the Peninsula and across the Bay Area. Control is primary GNSS and secondary Trimble S3 total station; every Trimble X9 setup is tied to it, processed in Trimble Business Center in US survey feet, with control held to 0.01 US survey feet relative to project control. Tighter verification is available on request, with the achieved accuracy stated in the report. Deliverables are a registered, cleaned point cloud (E57, LAS, or RCP), scan-to-CAD plans, sections, elevations, 3D linework, and coded points. See 3D laser scanning, as-built surveys, scanning in San Francisco, scanning in Palo Alto, and our San Mateo surveying page.