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NPHQ > Awards & Success
Stories > 2006 Make a Difference Award Winners > Minnesota
Highway Teams Win National Quality Award
Minnesota Design/Build Team Applies Economics to Engineering
New Orleans, LA/November 14, 2006 – The National Partnership for Highway Quality (NPHQ) awarded one of its National 2006 “Making a Difference” awards to a Minnesota highway team that successfully applied new project methods, techniques and practices and shared their innovative ideas with others so they too can “make a difference” in the quality of our nation’s highways. Entries are judged by a panel of transportation industry leaders who serve on the NPHQ Steering Committee.
Breaking the Mold
The Minnesota Department of Transportation (Mn/DOT) received the Gold Award in the NPHQ’s Breaking the Mold category. The team received the award for its work on quantifying the economic benefits of project acceleration and, in particular, the economic benefits of the Design/Build contracting method for the U.S. Highway 52 project in Rochester, Minnesota.
Mn/DOT developed a comprehensive methodological approach to estimating the economic impacts of accelerating a highway project within a risk analysis framework. The economic study showed that use of the Design/Build approach on the project profoundly reduced the impacts on the Rochester community and businesses and resulted in significant user cost benefits. The project has been viewed as an overwhelming success story by local residents and businesses of Rochester.
The outcome of the study was a computer model that can assess the macro-economic and micro-economic impacts of future projects. The tool will help Mn/DOT, and potentially other departments of transportation, make decisions on when project delivery acceleration,
particularly Design/Build, has significant benefits to justify the extra costs of a guaranteed completion date and/or price from the contracting firm.
“Minnesota has made an outstanding contribution to the highway industry,” said NPHQ’s Executive Director Bob Templeton. “Accelerating highway projects can result in huge costs, but if an analytical tool can show that the economic benefit outweighs the cost, not only does it contribute to the economy of the community, but also to the safety of the traveling public.”
Members of the team included: Mn/DOT, HDR/HLB Decision Economics, Inc. and Zumbro River Constructors, a joint venture of Fluor Enterprises, Inc., Ames Construction, Inc. and Edward Kraemer & Sons, Inc. For more information about the Mn/DOT economic study, contact Terry Ward, Mn/DOT’s Design Build Manager for the project, at (507) 424-1766 or terry.ward@dot.state.mn.us.
About NPHQ
The Making a Difference Award program is sponsored by the National Partnership for Highway Quality, which combines public and private highway expertise to deliver quality highways for the safety and mobility of the traveling public. NPHQ members include:
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