Compressing the Schedule with Design Build Plus Incentives: Is the Quality as Good?

State Departments of Transportation face a wide variety of challenges in serving their state constituencies. The public and the media often criticize the performance of agencies without always understanding the complexity of the issues faced by public transportation officials, including budget constraints, environmental concerns, and growth or no-growth initiatives. State Agencies are increasingly under public pressure to complete all aspects of their work, from long-term transit planning, to new road construction, to local maintenance operations, at a faster pace usually with less personnel. An increasing number of state highway agencies are turning to alternate project delivery systems such as design-build linked to help them deliver projects more quickly. Some agencies have found this is especially advantageous when replacing/upgrading sections of urban freeways which are overloaded with traffic and must remain open during construction. The lure of these alternative methods lies primarily in their ability to compress the schedule by overlapping design and construction and to create team synergies that can often expedite the project. Sanvido surveyed 351 building projects from 1992–1997 and reported that design-build projects were completed on the average 33% faster than design-bid-build projects. So while the increased delivery speed is appealing to State Highway agencies who are constantly under pressure to open lanes sooner, the concern is whether they are sacrificing quality for the sake of speed.