Bridge Planning Seminar 2008

What good
Design without a What was built first
planning said was First Stage of Plan
plan stage
required ultimately

“Failure to Plan is Planning to Fail”

Introduction
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 Introduction
• Welcome
• Purpose of Seminar
– Original goals were:
• To provide a venue for bridge planners to discuss and
exchange ideas and issues impacting delivery of this
specialized engineering function
• To present and discuss recent changes in AT bridge
planning info, best practices and tool advancements.
– Due to the unexpected level of interest from various
other bridge disciplines we have amended the
seminar to also include a more generic overview of
the bridge planning process as relates to current
practice

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 The Plan for Today
• Housekeeping
– Bathroom locations
– No smoking
– Breaks
– Cell phones
– Emergency Exits

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 Agenda
• Agenda Overview
– Questions/discussion welcome
– Moderator (Des) will keep things on schedule
– May be a few minutes at the end of
presentation for discussions
– Process for additional feedback

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Agenda

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 Bridge Planning Mini-History
Formal bridge planning started in Mid 1950’s

• Gordon Taylor was minister 1951-1971. He was the first minister of

Highways and Transport
• Was committed to developing key network highways in east/west
and north/south directions supported by district roads and local
roads
• 1960’s marked an era of the largest expansion of highways and
bridges in the province even under constrained financial budgets
• This was only possible from the bridge perspective by optimizing
bridge crossings through the bridge planning process
• Many of these structures have fully met their functional design
service life and still continue to function today in spite of massive
growth in traffic

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 Bridge Planning Mini-History
• First DD’s were completed in 1955
• The DD basic content used then is still used in current practice
• Emil Sanden was first AT bridge planner and became the guiding light for
dealing with the difficult complex river crossings that were necessary to
support the rapidly expanding highway network.
• Gerry Mazurek was the first Section Head of the Bridge Planning Section.
Under his direction many of the current senior practitioners learned their
trade.
• Up until 1995 all bridge planning for Alberta Transportation was done by the
Bridge Planning Section for major crossings. Preliminary engineering of
standards bridges and culvert was ultimately undertaken by regional bridge
staff in the mid 1980’s with the onset of the regional transportation offices
• All formal bridge planning has been outsourced since 1995 however AT will
likely undertake some limited bridge engineering including bridge planning in
order to preserve in-house expertise and to effectively better communicate
with practitioners with respect to technical issues.

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DD-100

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DD-100

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DD-100

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