American Jobs Plan to benefit the traffic control plan industry

< Back to Blog

In the United States, Congress recently passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal, which is the largest long-term investment in the nation’s infrastructure in the past century.  This $1.2 trillion investment is a critical step in implementing The American Jobs Plan, one part of President Biden’s three-part agenda to ‘rescue, recover, and rebuild’ the country.  

The Plan adds an additional $550 billion in transportation infrastructure, about 20% of which will go to upgrading roads and bridges. Over the next five years, this investment will repair 20,000 miles of highways, roads, and main streets most in need of modernization.  It will also fix the most “economically significant” large bridges and 10,000 of the worst smaller bridges across the country.  The federal spending will also be increased to $39 billion to modernize existing transit, including bus and rail services to new communities.  Additionally, the American Jobs Plan aims to modernize the electric grid, build out the nation’s high-speed broadband infrastructure, and eliminate 100% of remaining lead pipes to help improve the clean water supply.

The impacts of these investments will all translate to more work for construction businesses.  Many small and medium construction companies stand to profit from the expansive scope of work that needs to be done, as large-scale construction projects often filter down to contractors and sub-contractors.  According to a White House fact sheet, modernizing the electric grid alone would “put hundreds of thousands of people to work laying thousands of miles of transmission lines.”  Whether a company is aiming to help repair bridges, roads, and highways, working on upgrading stormwater and wastewater systems, or modernizing transmission lines in the electric grid running along roads, one thing they will certainly need are traffic control plans.  For those with traffic control companies, the American Jobs Plan is a promising sign of work to come. When it comes to designing traffic control plans, especially for government contracts, there is no better solution than RapidPlan.  Its unparalleled ease of use, coupled with the ability to produce traffic control plans at any level of complexity, has established RapidPlan as the preferred software solution amongst construction, engineering and traffic control companies, as well as the governing agencies and transportation authorities to whom they submit plans for approval.  RapidPlan enables its users to efficiently produce traffic control plans in a variety of ways through its intuitive tools, integrated mapping providers and preloaded templates. With the scope of work proposed in the American Jobs Plan, traffic control plans will likely be required for projects on both existing infrastructure and new builds. When designing plans in RapidPlan, you can choose between five different plan types to get started: Blank canvas, Base map, Static templates, Auto-templates, or from a PDF.  If traffic is being controlled on or around existing roadways, you may wish to utilize the integrated base maps within RapidPlan as a starting point.  Creating plans over base maps is often the optimal solution to ensure those setting up a work zone know exactly where each device is to be placed, resulting in improved execution of a traffic control plan and minimized potential liability for your company.  Whether you have a full address, cross streets, location coordinates, or even just keywords like a nearby business, you can quickly locate your worksite in RapidPlan and begin designing your traffic control plan over up-to-date satellite imagery from one of the map providers built into RapidPlan.  What’s more is that you can rest assured any measurements taken over these maps are accurate, in turn allowing you to quantify the exact number of devices required on your worksite when submitting your bid for a contract or loading up your trucks to go set up your worksite.  In addition to the map providers built into RapidPlan, our software integrates with two leading, high-quality subscription-based mapping services, NearMap and MetroMap.  Does the city in which your project will take place require that you use their GIS data to develop your plan?  No problem – RapidPlan also integrates with custom GIS servers. At Invarion, we understand that not all plans can be designed over satellite imagery, whether that’s due to requirements of the governing transportation authority or poor visibility due to trees and other obstructions.  RapidPlan’s base maps, by design, are not inherently a part of your plan background for this very reason (though, they are only one click away from becoming it).  Many users choose to use the base maps as a guide while drawing out the roads on a plan to ensure accuracy in their drawings.  Unlike other computer-aided design software, within RapidPlan, you do not need to manually trace out every line on a roadway in order to design your roads.  Rather, you can select from one of several intuitive road tools and design your roads through simple mouse-clicks while you shape as you go.  Aligning lane counts, lane markings, and other road elements with those reflected on the underlying satellite imagery is made easy through a centralized Properties palette, and you can save road styles for future use to avoid repeating these actions.  To make things even easier, you can also import road layouts and RapidPlan will automatically draw your road or road network for you.  From there, just define the roads’ properties or apply some of your pre-saved road styles to save yourself hours of time compared to other design softwares. You also have preloaded template packages at your disposal in RapidPlan.  Before creating any plans of your own, browse through over 100 readily-available templates in RapidPlan comprised of the typical application diagrams from the MUTCD and state-specific manuals, including California, Florida, Texas and more.  Every template is fully controllable, in case any changes need to be made to suit your specific worksite.  You can even enable the aforementioned integrated base maps when working with any template in RapidPlan and right-size the template to your specific worksite, removing any objects your plan does not need.  The newest plan type in RapidPlan, Auto-template, aims to do most of this for you.  Using Auto-templates could not be easier; locate your worksite on the map, select the template you wish to apply, mark the start and end points for your work zone and confirm or update a few more pieces of information, and RapidPlan will design the plan for you.  From there, you have the same control you do with the Base map plan type – to import the satellite imagery or not – and you can still add objects to your plan or modify anything automatically laid out for you With the American Jobs Plan expected to bolster US infrastructure in so many different ways, it comes as no surprise that the proposed scope of work will benefit a vast number of construction companies across the nation.  Whether you are working on repairing highways, fixing bridges, or building out the broadband infrastructure, your projects will require traffic control plans to ensure the safety of your team and motorists alike.  With its ease of use, efficiency, and the ability to make clear and detailed plans in a number of different ways, RapidPlan is the best solution for the management of traffic control.  Contact us today to learn more about how RapidPlan can benefit you.