The Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) received special funding to convert Highway 169 from the Mississippi River to 197th Avenue into a freeway system through the City of Elk River. WSB was contracted to provide the final design for the project, which included converting four at-grade traffic intersections into interchanges and modified highway access.
Due to the special funding, our team had a Guaranteed Maximum Price (GMP) construction cap of $130 million that could not be exceeded. The design needed to be iterative and flexible, and we needed to provide real time quantities in order to stay on budget. The team utilized Bentley tools to help find more efficient designs and had our Construction Manager/General Contactor (CMGC) price changes from the software’s outputs to validate the savings. Without these tools, our schedule would have not allowed the fluid transfer of design and quantities to the CMGC.
