Officials look to survey sidewalks with lasers
City officials want to use a laser scanning process to survey the condition of Kingston’s sidewalks.
City Engineer Ralph Swenson told the Common Council’s Finance and Audit Committee this past week that Kingston has a lot of broken sidewalks or ones that are in poor condition. To manually measure them all would take years, he said. Swenson said the sidewalk condition must be mapped as part of the city’s efforts to come into compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act, or ADA.
To measure the sidewalks automatically, Swenson said he wants to utilize the services of Maser Consulting P.A. of Albany. He said the firm has a laser scanning process that can quickly collect the data the city needs. Swenson said the company would drive through the city and essentially photograph the area.
“I was hoping to use it to help us comply with our ADA transition plan,” Swenson told the committee.
Swenson asked the committee to transfer $20,000 from the city budget’s contingency fund to the Engineering Office’s budget to pay for a limited scan of some city streets. He said the limited scan would allow the city to see what kind of information would be provided through the process.
Maser would charge the city $18,300 for the service. Of that, $12,500 would be for the mobile mapping survey, while the remainder would be for geographic information system data migration, according to a proposal from the company.
Under the proposal, Maser would “deliver a design-grade base map and surface model of the two highlighted areas based on feature extraction detailing structure face, sidewalk, curb/ gutter, drive and ramp cuts and
grades, roadway surface points, sign, street light,
power pole, visible utilities and existing paint stripe locations.”
The firm would laser scan the Broadway, West O’Reilly Street, Mary’s Avenue and Andrew Street
block in Midtown, as well as the Uptown area of John, Crown and North Front streets.
Swenson said the firm could scan the entire city in two days.
Kristen Wilson, vice chairwoman of Kingston’s Complete Streets Advisory Council, said the city must create an ADA transition plan, which would be a tool to help the city
meet the requirements of the federal act. She said the transition plan itself could take 25 to 30 years to implement.
The Finance and Audit Committee voted in favor
of transferring the money to pay for the scanning. The budget transfer request still must be voted on by the full Common Council, which next meets July 11.