darwink
Senior Member
Through competitive dialog as your partners get closer on their corridors, you drill, you drill on all three. Since it isn’t about reducing risk to the city directly, it is about derisking for your partners, you can always ensure you have the right amount and the right locations to convince your partners they can manage risk. And yes! It is all about trust: to work well together you need to present everything, warts and all. The benefit is you don’t need the same level of technical people in house or as consultants to help you do this-the partners tell you what they need so you avoid the mismatch and you know early if there are problems.I like this - a few questions...
- how do you provide "a boat load of geotechnical" across a 500m wide corridor at all relevant depths? One of the issues that has come out earlier this year is that the chosen alignment had bigger geotechnical challenges than was imagined when the route was selected. If we couldn't figure out the geotechnical risks along one alignment, how would we figure out the geotechnical risks along all possible alignments? I suppose one answer is a smarter technical team, and another is a technical team more willing to speak the truth rather than waffle when they encounter problems. Still seems hard?
- how do you do discovery of community preferences/tradeoffs? Do all 3 design-build groups speak to community groups and affected landowners independently and try to weigh their interests? Or is the city sort of acting as an engagement subcontractor on behalf of the designers to feed this back? I will say, whatever the City is doing on engagement isn't working - they spend years determining that everyone would love a deep tunnel that disturbs no one's local interests, so no hard choices are made until it's clear it costs too much.
The engagement the question is: what level is needed. Aesthetic engagement for station locations is a late stage thing that can be done directly by the contractor. Design engagement to bring in local knowledge I think can be left up totally to the contractors: if they think it is useful to show community support; do so—if they think they can save a bit by incorporating local knowledge (usually quite true!) they would do so . Most consultation led by the city should be spent on defining the not normal scope type thing, and explaining how this process is different and what to expect.
And you’ve hit the nail on the head. They ended up creating a path dependency where they were ignoring a primary constraint. A usual problem when you don’t have a good process designed by your policy people at first OR don’t have a leader who has a ‘natural’ vision of the check list to get to approval and contract signed (from experience). We were counting on the second and didn’t have it.