Engineering consultant firm DKS Associates has announced that Chris Maciejewski has been named president and chief executive officer, effective Oct. 6.

Maciejewski succeeds Peter Coffey, who will retire at the end of November after nearly a decade in executive leadership.

Founded in 1979, DKS Associates is a national, employee-owned firm specializing in transportation planning, design and engineering. The firm is headquartered in Portland.

Maciejewski has been at DKS for 25 years. He will lead the firm’s eight offices nationwide, fostering growth, innovation and employee development while maintaining a commitment to client success, DKS stated in a press release.

Since joining DKS in 2000, Maciejewski has served in multiple leadership roles, including chief operating officer, advisor to the board of directors, Portland office manager and principal-in-charge of many significant projects. Over the past eight years, as COO, he has overseen firmwide operations, helping guide strategy and taking the company through a period of growth and transformation, according to the firm.

“I’m honored to serve as president and CEO,” Maciejewski stated in the release. “I believe deeply in what we can accomplish as we grow together as a firm where people feel engaged and connected to a shared purpose, where expertise and curiosity thrive, and where innovation is embedded in our everyday work.”

Coffey will remain with DKS through November to support a seamless transition.

“Chris has shown tremendous leadership and commitment to our people, our clients, and our vision for the future,” Coffey stated in a press release. “The board is confident he’s the right person to lead DKS forward.”

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The Oregon Department of Transportation is for an Interstate 84 bridge project in Troutdale.

The project will involve replacing the existing eastbound and westbound Interstate 84 bridge structures spanning Graham Road in Troutdale. Also, Graham Road will be widened to accommodate a three-lane, one-way section. Interstate 84 will be rebuilt where necessary to accommodate the changes, and the westbound exit ramp and eastbound entrance ramp also will be reconstructed as necessary.

Finally, a new sidewalk and bicycle path will be built on the east side of Graham Road.

The improvements along Graham Road will require modifications to two existing traffic signals on Frontage Road as well as the existing illumination system.

The project team includes engineering consultant David Evans and Associates, transportation engineering specialist DKS Associates, and geotechnical engineers Northwest Geotech Inc. and Foundation Engineering Inc.

The project’s estimated value is between $10 million and $20 million.

Bids for the project will be accepted until 9 a.m. on Nov. 15. To be eligible for an ODOT construction contract, a bidder must submit a prequalification application at least 10 calendar days before the bid closing date.

Construction is expected to begin late this year by late 2018 and is expected to take up to two years to complete.

For technical information, contact ODOT project manager Chris Aguon at 503-731-3197 or christopher.aguon@odot.state.or.us.

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A rush to push through multifamily projects in Portland before the effective date of inclusionary housing rules kept many metro-area architects busy in 2017. However, such a surge is unlikely to repeat in 2018, according to industry professionals.

“There is going to be a lull in housing,” Portland Design Commission Chairwoman Julie Livingston said. “We are working through all the multifamily housing submittals that came in before the inclusionary housing rules took effect.”

Those rules essentially require sizable multifamily projects to include a minimum amount of affordable units. Developers hastily submitted many plans before Feb. 1 to prevent them from being subject to the rules. That created a huge backlog of work for area architects.

“We are absolutely feeling (the impact of inclusionary housing rules),” Ankrom Moisan Architects managing design principal Michael Great said. “Of course we are on the front end of that right now. A lot of the bigger projects have slowed down or stopped.”

So what can the architecture and engineering industries look forward to next year? Some stakeholders believe developers may shift their focus outside of Portland to the suburbs. Plus, Portland Public Schools and other public agencies are expected to move ahead with projects that now have funding. The bigger questions could be whether limited availability of contractors and rising costs of materials hamper construction efforts.

In 2017, business was booming. The Portland Design Commission saw a hectic schedule, with hearings taking place at least three times per month for most of the year. At one point, hearings occurred seven straight weeks. Normally, the group holds hearings twice per month.

“Those projects all have to get through their appeal period sometime in April, May or June (2018), depending on when they were submitted,” Livingston said. “We are going to be working through the pre-inclusionary housing submittals for the next couple months, but they are slowing down. And there aren’t more housing submittals coming into the pipeline.”

Developers are looking at a variety of ways to avoid inclusionary housing rules in 2018. One is building in surrounding communities.

“You will see more development in Gresham and Beaverton,” Great said. “The scale of those projects might be a little smaller.”

But while multifamily projects may wane in Portland, public ones won’t. Voters in May passed Portland Public Schools’ $790 million bond measure to pay for modernization of four schools and safety-related repairs at virtually every school in the district. Madison and Benson high schools will be remodeled, and Lincoln High School and Kellogg Middle School will be rebuilt.

“There is more school work than I can remember in the past,” KPFF managing principal Blake Patsy said. “There is some big transportation work that is coming through and we are hoping to get a piece of that. If there wasn’t the school and transportation spending, we would be expecting to have a little less prosperous 2018.”

Airport and road construction projects are in the works across the country. Large infrastructure improvement legislation has passed in multiple states in the West. Firms that specialize in public works projects are already tracking opportunities.

The Port of Portland Commission has approved plans to move forward with more than $900 million in improvements at Portland International Airport over the next several years.

“I think, going forward, you are going to see a lot of (infrastructure) construction,” DKS Associates principal Randy McCourt said.

For many firms, the infrastructure work will help make up for a slowdown in residential work.

“Just here in Portland, there are a lot of significant projects, including improvements for I-205, Highway 217, the Southwest Corridor,” McCourt said. “Then there are trails and bike lanes. Portland has got major expansions going on.”

However, securing materials to build those projects became difficult in late 2017. Fires raged across California and hurricanes pounded the southern U.S., destroying thousands of structures. Reconstruction efforts put a crimp in the supply chain of materials such as shingles, gypsum and drywall. Those supply problems will likely continue into 2018 and drive already rising construction prices even higher.

“I have been sitting in a lot of meetings (focusing on) how to reduce costs,” Great said.

Meanwhile, the number of contractors available to tackle projects has dwindled. A wealth of work in Portland and across the country left contractors with a choice of projects.

“Just getting the subs is a challenge,” Great said. “It is hard to get people out to do the work.”

Building industry firms used a variety of methods to deal with the rising costs in 2017 and will continue to employ many of them in 2018. Some architects are recommending their clients build projects in phases.

“I think the construction climate for getting a project done and under budget is very challenging,” Di Loreto Architecture founding principal Chris DiLoreto said. “The pricing is a real problem.”

DiLoreto said that building projects in smaller sections allowed his largely institutional clients to maintain quality within monetary budgets. The rising costs also have made clients more willing to consider cutting-edge materials such as cross-laminated timber (CLT).

“There is more genuine interest in CLT, and I think that will continue,” Patsy said. “It is always good to have more options to present to our clients. More and more it’s being looked at.”

Also, growing needs for architects and engineers required many firms to look beyond Portland for employees. It’s a trend that is expect to continue in the new year.

“Finding good people is always a struggle,” Patsy said. “We have hired eight to 10 people last year, and most of those people are moving in from out of state. Fortunately for us, a lot of people want to move to Portland.”

For most firms, 2017 presented not only an opportunity to grow, but also meet challenges. Many businesses expect a lull in 2018, but most expect the Portland-metro market to remain strong.

“2017 was a good year,” Patsy said.” I think 2018 won’t be unlike that, barring any major catastrophe. I don’t know any reason it wouldn’t.”

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Drivers in cities who encounter a new sign prohibiting a left turn or a roundabout or a motor vehicle diverter might be able to blame navigation apps for that obstacle.

While apps like Waze and Google can save drivers time and aggravation, they can also cause headaches for the people in charge of designing cities’ transportation infrastructure.

“Essentially you have different goals,” said Eric Shimizu, principal engineer and regional director for smart cities and connected vehicles at DKS Associates. App developers “are into computer analyses and how to help people with flexibility and making choices. We have to worry about designing safe transport.”

Engineers responsible for ensuring safe and efficient travel on city streets are adopting a variety of strategies to accomplish their goals. They can’t tell apps where to direct drivers, but they can influence traffic enough to make their desired outcomes favorable to the apps.

When an app tells a driver to travel on a residential street, it is simply relying on an algorithm that determines the most efficient route. A traffic engineer has to also take into account the likelihood, especially on smaller streets, that a cut-through driver will exceed the posted speed limit and consequently increase the chances of a fatal accident.

The chances of a pedestrian fatality in a collision with a vehicle nearly double as the vehicle’s speed increases above 25 mph, according to study results from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.

“Typically, when we look at projects, the big arterials are where we want the traffic to go,” said Hermanus Steyn, senior principal engineer at Kittelson & Associates. “What is happening is (the apps) look at the whole network. We want people to travel Barbur (Boulevard). With the apps, they are trying to find the quickest routes between points A and B. The big models we use don’t include the smaller routes.”

The end result is that apps often send large numbers of motor vehicles to streets that weren’t designed to handle such volume.

Engineers are beginning to take this into account. During a recent traffic mitigation project in Clyde Hill, Washington, Shimizu said, consideration of how apps would react to changes in the streetscape became a major part of the project.

DKS’ studies found that nearly half of drivers in the Seattle suburb used navigational apps. Due to congestion on State Route 520, apps sent a lot of drivers to smaller neighborhood streets. This was despite the presence of an available arterial, Bellevue Way.

“Bellevue Way was underutilized for how big the road is,” Shimizu said. “It could handle the increased capacity, but the apps were telling drivers that the cut through is saving time.”

Engineers’ solution hinged on increasing the drive time along cut-through routes during rush hour. Their traffic studies revealed that when drive times through the most popular cut-through routes increased by two to three minutes, the apps would send drivers back to the arterial roads that were designed to handle the volume.

“We calculated times over the course of nine months,” Shimizu said. “When we were doing this study, (drivers) would save three minutes, which is significant on a short trip of about 20 to 25 minutes. The apps are pretty good in saving time.”

Engineers adopted a multiphase strategy to influence behaviors of both navigational apps and drivers. First, they made a major effort to inform regular drivers of the speed limits on the smaller roads.

“They started slowing down,” Shimizu said. “We had a good timing benefit. The apps take the actual driver information it is collecting. It knows what velocity drivers are traveling at. That information and that calculation formulates the path routing.”

The next step included a combination of strategies. They added no-left-turn signs on numerous streets to force drivers to travel past signals and then come back to make a right-hand turn. They also added permanent roundabouts on numerous east-west streets to slow drivers even more.

Lastly, they tweaked traffic lights that grant access to State Route 520.

“They adjusted the meter rate just slightly, which added the minute and pushed us over the two- to three-minute goal,” Shimizu said.

Engineers largely got what they wanted. As traffic slowed on the smaller surface streets, the apps began routing drivers back onto the larger roads.

“All the sudden we saw a big shift to go to Bellevue Way,” Shimizu said. “It has lanes and plenty of space. We saw with the apps that eight to nine out of 10 drivers avoided the cut through.”

Traffic engineers in Portland are using similar techniques, although few go to the extent that designers did in the Seattle-metro area.

“Portland is one of the test cities to reduce speeds to 20 mph from 25 mph,” Steyn said. “Basically the idea is to target speed if you can’t control the algorithm.”

The new speeds will roll out next year, Portland Bureau of Transportation Public Information Officer Dylan Rivera said. PBOT officials hope the traffic apps will consider a 20 mph street less attractive.

“We think Waze would consider those residential streets with a 20 mph speed limit as less favorable alternatives to busy streets that are marked 30 mph, for example,” he said. “Today they might see a residential street with a 25 mph speed limit as a viable alternative to a busy street.”

Planners also must deal with unintended consequences. An effort to limit cars on one street to promote bicycle and pedestrian use can send a stream of vehicles down another parallel street that can’t handle the volume.

When city planners aimed to increase bicyclists’ use of Southeast Ankeny Street, they faced a big challenge: it runs parallel to Southeast Burnside Street. When Burnside is crowded during rush hour, drivers flood onto Ankeny. Although no study was performed to identify how many drivers were rerouted there by apps, engineers knew they had to direct them elsewhere.

“Our policy is Ankeny is a greenway and to prioritize it for bike use,” Rivera said. “We have put in diverters that force traffic off Ankeny.”

The diverters (physical, man-made barriers) allowed bicyclists to roll though, but not drivers. Early studies showed a 20 percent reduction in the traffic on Southeast Ankeny; it wasn’t 100 percent because some apps won’t show diverters and direct drivers onto streets blocked to vehicular traffic in reality, but appear clear in cyberspace.

Another issue is that drivers often trust their technology more than their own eyes. When the no-left-turn signs were posted in Clyde Hill, drivers frequently would turn left anyway because their apps said they could.

“The cops would sit there and were pointing at them to don’t (turn),” Shimizu said. “The driver would look at the app and make the turn anyway.”

While navigation apps can hurt an engineer’s best-laid traffic plans, they can also provide useful information.

“Overall, they have been more a benefit than detriment,” Shimizu said. “Google alone has helped do field reconnaissance. Initially, you get a feel of what is out there. We love the added information.”

Meanwhile, PBOT officials are engaged in ongoing conversations with Waze developers.

“We are trying to figure out how to get their app to show school zones,” Rivera said.

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At first glance, nothing about the design of the new Bridge Street Bridge, in Sumner, Washington, looks extraordinary. Only upon closer inspection, however, people may notice the intricacies that took nearly a decade to incorporate and bring to reality.

“It looks like a fairly simple bridge,” said Eric Shimizu, a principal with DKS Associates. “It was very important to have decorative lighting. We came up with an idea that tied the bridge to the community.”

The $17 million, 300-foot-long structure will have programmable LEDs in the catenary and street fixtures. Also, sconce lighting fixtures will be embedded in the handrails, and a wireless sound system will be installed.

“The light on the roadway can be programmed to be red, white and blue for Fourth of July,” Shimizu said. “It can be turned green and red for Christmas or blue and green for the (Seattle) Seahawks.”

Designers hope that such measures will help the new structure retain some of the historic charm of its predecessor. The city of Sumner was forced to demolish the previous, 90-year-old Bridge Street Bridge after it was deemed functionally obsolete. It had received a 7 rating on a 100-point sufficiency scale.

The former bridge employed a steel truss that made a perfect place for wrapping Christmas lights and holding holiday gatherings. Its functionality, however, waned over the years. Officials even began to question whether the bridge could continue to hold upwards of 5,000 people during the yearly holiday celebration.

“They were worried about the weight of having that many people on the bridge and were looking at having to keep people off,” said Jackie Wells, promotions coordinator for the Old Cannery Furniture Warehouse – the celebration’s organizer. “It’s not going to be the same. We are going to do something else. It’s neat that they were able to put in the colored lights that we can use for events.”

The design process was complicated by the fact that the bridge crosses the White River. It’s a habitat for numerous species of fish, limiting not only the work window but also where light can shine. The Muckleshoot Reservation is located along the river, so it had a say in the bridge project.

“The Indian reservation was concerned the lighting hitting the water might change fish patterns,” Shimizu said. “When you are looking at light on the waterways, you try to get a lot of color temperature to mimic the moonlight.”

Those constraints forced designers to make sure lighting would aim down onto the roadway and not flood out into the water. Stringing lights, dimmer and more focused on the roadway, also will be used to mitigate light pollution.

“There are cables that go over the bridge and there are lights hanging from the wire,” Shimizu said. “They are strategically placed to create more of starry appearance.”

There were also issues involving funding and ownership of land in the right-of-way. However, construction eventually began in May, and is expected to finish in June 2019. Officials anticipate approximately 7,500 motorists and pedestrians to use the bridge each day.

“It was really fun,” Shimizu said. “We were able to come up with creative solutions to some unique problems.”

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National firm DKS Associates has chosen Peter Coffey as its new president. His duties include leading business growth efforts as well as providing oversight and strategic direction for seven offices.

“I am both honored and excited about the future to extend DKS’ legacy,” Coffey stated in an email to the 91��Ƶ. “Our firm will continue to focus on shaping the future of transportation with the goal of building safer and more efficient communities while providing opportunities for our employees to advance.”

Oakland, California-based DKS, which has offices in Portland and Salem, also named Jim Peters as chief business development officer and Chris Maciejewski as chief operating officer. The company specializes in transportation planning, design and engineering services for public agencies across the country.

Coffey has spent his entire 32-year engineering career working for DKS Associates. His selection was the culmination of a two-year search committee effort to replace outgoing President Randy McCourt.

Coffey, a professionally registered engineer in both Oregon and Washington, has served as office manager in both Portland and Oakland, as a board member and as principal-in-charge of some of the firm’s biggest projects. He joined the firm after receiving his civil engineering degree from Oregon State University in 1985.

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Travelers seeking to park their motor vehicles at Portland International Airport will eventually have more spaces to choose from. They just won’t be available until 2020.

That is when a $246 million, seven-story, long-term parking garage is scheduled to open at the airport. The project is in the early design phase, with Yost Grube Hall Architecture at work.

Insufficient airport parking has become plainly apparent, according to Port of Portland spokeswoman Kama Simonds.

“In the last two to three years our long-term parking garages have been full a lot, especially on Tuesday and Thursday with business travelers,” she said.

When long-term parking spaces fill, there is a ripple effect: drivers tend to head to short-term spaces, which forces more cars into the economy parking lot.

“The short-term lot is intended for people picking up passengers or those who have business at the airport,” Simonds said.

The new garage will include approximately 2,400 public parking spaces. The facility will also include a customer service lobby and 724,000 square feet for rental cars.

“It is our goal to have 100 percent of rental cars on site,” Simonds said. “Right now, some (companies) shuttle out to remote sites. Getting them close in is something that our customers have asked for.”

Money from taxpayers won’t be used to pay for the new garage, according to Simonds. People who rent and park cars at PDX will pick up the tab.

Flexibility is something that Yost Grube Hall Architecture was told to include in its design.

“We need flexibility with regards to technology,” Simonds said. “Maybe in 20 years or even two years self-driving cars will be in use. Then there is car sharing. We want to accommodate all of the different ways that people use cars. We have to be able to produce flexibility in the facility.”

Despite the frequent parking crunch, Portland International Airport ranked as one of the top airports in the country last year. PDX in 2016 saw a 9 percent surge in traffic to nearly 18 million fliers. Port officials are seeking to better serve those travelers via the new garage.

“Our goal is to have as many spaces as possible up front where people can walk to the terminal,” Simonds said. “That is something that is important to our customers.”

PAE Engineers, KPFF Consulting Engineers and DKS Associates are providing engineering services for the project. JE Dunn Construction will build the facility.

Design work is expected to continue through the third quarter of 2018. Construction is likely to begin in the fourth quarter of 2018 and last through the second quarter of 2020.

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