Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
guarantee that a project on the regional TIP will get on the state TIP.
Getting on the state TIP is the achievement that ends the second stage
in the process. By now, leading transportation officials, including the com-
missioner of the state DoT, are on record in support of the project. The
project is henceforth scheduled to receive funds for construction—though
it actually gets built only if all the subsequent steps in the process go well.
A project on the state TIP has a high chance of being constructed, though
large, complex, and controversial projects naturally face more challenges to
completion than minor ones.
Stage 3: Preliminary Design and Environmental Review
For the next stage, the DoT again appoints a multidisciplinary project team
and project leader, perhaps some of the same professionals who previously
worked on project scoping. The team then assigns staff and consultants to
a series of studies, whenever possible recycling data already assembled dur-
ing scoping.
For Route 219 through Cattaraugus County, the project team had to
study impacts of the most promising alignments. Here is a sampling of the
issues studied: impacts on road access to villages along the route, community
character, planned housing, oil and gas wells, agricultural soils, agricultural
districts, hazardous waste sites, aquifers, archeological sites, state forests,
churches and schools, and historic buildings. Effects had to be examined
on hundreds of streams, most of them rivulets. Their combined roles in
watersheds and effects on water quality also had to be understood. Since
the expressway would pass over Cattaraugus Creek, a scenic gorge, there
had to be intensive study of migratory birds in the gorge and of habitats
for the clubshell mussel, a species listed by the US Fish and Wildlife Ser-
vice as endangered. From each candidate alignment, there were separate
implications for acquisition of land rights-of-way, whose numbers and costs
of acquisition had to be estimated.
In general, such a team produces two interrelated reports. One is the
draft design report,
which proposes the engineering design for road, embank-
ments, culverts, bridges, etc.: the types of information that will be needed
for construction. The other is the
draft environmental impact statement
(EIS).
The documents are then distributed to other agencies that will have a say
in final permitting. The draft EIS is also made available to the public, so
individual citizens and groups can make their views known in public hear-
ings and meetings. Based on comments received and problems identified
through public involvement, and after any additional studies are conducted
to address these problems, the team issues a
final design report
and final EIS.
If there are further objections and lawsuits, the reports may turn out to be
