Bridges

Accelerated Bridge Construction (ABC) techniques have demonstrated significant time savings, and improved the quality of bridge construction. However, no design procedures or guidelines exist for ABC in seismically active areas. ABC utilises innovative planning, design and construction methods in a safe and cost-effective manner to reduce the onsite construction time that occurs when building new bridges. On the MacKays to Peka Peka Expressway project, the design team worked in collaboration with the constructors to develop and implement a number of ABC initiatives. These include:

• Standardisation of the elements for modular pre-cast bridge elements
• Prefabrication of bridge components or complex and heavy reinforcement cages
• Foundation systems for efficient, quality and speedy construction
• Elimination of an element or operation or dependency of elements on each other, if possible, to reduce the total number of elements/operations in the construction sequence
• Connection of different bridge elements for safe and durable construction
• Installation of bridge components in a safe and cost-effective manner.

This paper describes how the collaboration between designers and constructors enabled the use of a number of ABC techniques in a highly seismic area.