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NPHQ > Awards & Success
Stories > 2006 Make a Difference Award Winners > Texas
Texas Highway Teams Win National Quality Awards
New Orleans, LA/November 14, 2006 – The National Partnership for Highway Quality (NPHQ) has awarded two of its National 2006 “Making a Difference” awards to Texas highway teams whose quality innovations promote roads that are completed more quickly, ride better, last longer, reduce congestion, and improve safety. Entries are judged by a panel of transportation industry leaders who serve on the NPHQ Steering Committee.
A Silver Award went to the Texas Department of Transportation in NPHQ’s Breaking the Mold category for its innovative construction practices in building the State’s first five-level interchange. The Dallas High-five interchange, navigated by more than 500,000 vehicles a day, was finished in four-years rather than the five-year contract period and under the original eight-year estimate.
Instead of the traditional approach of using multiple contractors, one general contractor - Zachry Corporation, was used which shaved four years off the initial estimated completion date. The team also realized considerable time savings by building the bridge segments on site.
Perhaps the most unique contractor innovation was partnering with an Italian firm to build a remote-control erector that places bridge segments in place. The segment erector, nicknamed Sergio, eliminates as many as ten steps from traffic control plans and allows bridge segments to be placed in half the time it takes with traditional methods.
Financial incentives and disincentives were built into the contract to keep the project on schedule and lane rental fees helped mitigate the impacts of construction on the traveling public. When the project was over, Zachry Corporation earned an $11.5 million bonus for trimming a full year off the project.
Another Silver Award
Additionally, Texas won a Silver Award in the Risk Taking category for developing a one-stop shopping, streamlined process for over 10,000 Texas-based motor carriers. A project team developed a web-based application to synchronize federal and state carrier data and automate the process of a Single-State Registration System (SSRS) credential.
No other State had attempted to merge data from Federal and State databases into one efficient system. Despite institutional barriers, Texas was up for the job and put a team together to problem-solve the situation. The team came up with a new system that produced, among other results, cutting the application from seven pages to one and shaving the time it takes to obtain credentials from 11 to eight working days.
Texas took a risk in moving ahead with a new system despite the fact that a new Federal system was on the horizon, mainly because the turtle’s pace of the antiquated system to process applications simply could not keep up with demand. Fortunately, their computer application could provide a building block for the successor program to SSRS that will be developed under the 2005 Federal transportation bill.
“The Texas projects exemplify the best in customer service,” said NPHQ’s Executive Director Bob Templeton. “Whether it was carefully crafted construction plans that mitigated inconvenience to the traveling public or cutting red tape for truckers, customer service was the driving force behind the innovations.”
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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