Josh Pedersen on the Future of Transportation in Florida

Associate Vice President Josh Pedersen discusses the future of transportation in Florida, including a focus on alleviating traffic congestion, expanding express lanes, growing the use of connected and autonomous vehicles, and project delivery using the progressive design-build approach.

So, what we have to understand is Florida, really, it's all about managing congestion. Some of the numbers that I've seen are we're expecting, in the next 30 years, over 1000 people every single day are going to move to Florida. So that's great, but with all the new people comes congestion, and so we've been trying to figure that out for a while now. A few years ago, Florida was very focused on moving past just widening our roadways and looking at technology-based solutions to some of our congestion issues. So that included things like express lanes and connected and autonomous vehicle technologies. Really, almost a decade ago is when we started looking at express lane projects. And we now have a total of nine different managed lane facilities all around the state in the different metro areas. And that's been very successful. What we found is that it does provide a reliable travel time for people who want to use those express lanes. They can even jump in there during rush hour and they can get where they need to get at the time that they know they'll get there. So, that's been very successful. We actually have a dozen more managed lane projects in the pipeline, so we expect that to continue to be a trend. As far as connected and autonomous vehicles, it has been a little slower to develop than a lot of people predicted a few years ago, but Florida is still very interested in promoting those technologies. We see there's going to be a lot of benefits with safety and also with the congestion issue that we have. Florida actually invested in a facility called SunTrax, specifically built for testing CAV technologies and tolling technologies, and that's open to business as of about a year ago now. So, it's a place where all the different vendors can come and it will be, I think, a key part of what we do going forward in terms of making sure those technologies are safe. Florida is definitely on the cutting edge. A lot of people would say the bleeding edge probably when it comes to technologies. One of the things that we've jumped wholeheartedly into in Florida is the 3D model-based design process. So, this is very different than the traditional kind of two dimensional plan sheets that we used to produce. And what it does is it gives us a very detailed model. We're using this on all of our major projects nowadays. And that allows us to look at things like, utility conflicts potentially underground as well as maybe phasing of construction. So, we get a much better picture of what the project design actually looks like in that 3D model. Another I'll say innovation, maybe more than a technology, is Florida is really experimenting and exploring different options for how we deliver our projects. So, we've done design-build for a long time in transportation. But we are now kind of taking a page out of the vertical construction industry and looking at a thing called progressive or phase design-build project delivery. So what that is, is instead of a design-build team of an engineer and a contractor making a bid on a set of concept plans that an owner has prepared, what they do is they procure that design-build team at the very beginning of the process based on their qualifications. And then what that allows is for the owner and the engineer and the contractor to all be working together. The owner has transparency into the pricing and the process, and the engineer and contractor are able to share ideas and come up with innovations as they work through the process. So we've tested that out on a major interchange over in Tampa, and FDOT is actually even looking at kind of playing a little bit more, coming up with new ideas, where they might procure multiple teams and then take those plans to maybe a 30% level before a bid. So, we're exploring lots of different opportunities and ideas on that front. One of the things that the FDOT transportation secretary says very often is while it’s an incredible machine at delivering projects, we can't... all of us in the industry need to work on how can we improve things. We can't just rely on that machine to keep doing what it's been doing, because we have a lot of challenges. We have a limited amount of funding and we need to keep improving. So that's exciting and very encouraging for us engineer types. You know, we love to improve and continue to innovate. So, we're excited about that.