Police Academy Design Consultant
Driver Training Range Design
J. Robert Jones, Jr., PE, LLC
Introduction
Planning
Budgets vs Estimates vs Actual costs
Site Considerations
Common Issues
Design Decisions
Range Types
Environmental Issues
Occupational Safety Issues
Design Firms (Choosing the right firm for your Project)
Construction
Administrative Controls
What can go wrong?
Introduction
I began my engineering career at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in 1984 when the popular TV shows were Chips, Charlie’s Angels, the A team and shows like the Dukes of Hazzard and Dirty Harry portrayed Law Enforcement as the wild west.
Over the next 30 plus years, law enforcement training evolved into a highly technical field that requires specialized knowledge and experience to support. I have worked as a consultant with federal, state, local and private owners throughout the country on over a dozen driver training ranges.
As a Project Engineer and later Chief of Design and Construction, I witnessed the evolution of training facility design from trial and error to a well organized cyclical lessons learned approach.
Driver Training ranges evolved from a winding road race track where lap times and course memorization were the measure of success to a more real world series venues linked together in response to historical issues for each jurisdiction.
The challenge now is to duplicate real world venues such as intersections, blind curves, wet areas, etc. in a cost efficient and safe environment.
Today many local jurisdictions pursue their own training venues, and each project faces the same set of design decisions that create operational problems resulting in costly rework, maintenance and operations.
This narrative is written from the perspective of the Owner/User and is intended to help make the process easier to understand and hopefully prevent many common “mistakes” made without the benefit of lessons learned. I have tried to write it in a non-technical format with some short stories of good and bad decisions and experiences to help illustrate what works and doesn’t work.
It also includes discussion on life cycle issues to demonstrate how many short term decisions become long term problems.
Planning
The first questions to answer seems a given. Do you really need a driver training range? Are there alternatives? Sounds simple but once a range is built, it comes with risks, responsibilities and expenses that can’t be ignored.
Long term vs short term: Short term needs can become long term problems if proper planning is skipped. Often training is conducted in a large paved parking lot with temporary cones for a layout.
Does the need really justify the expense and have long term considerations been included in the decision making process.
Location and community growth: More often than not, a site is selected and purchased before any consideration for layout, size or training plans is made. Once a site is picked, designers have to work backwards to fit the training plans within site constraints.
Training considerations: During the planning process, many questions need to be considered and evaluated.
Hold brain storming sessions with stakeholders determine requirements.
Historical data should be collected to identify all incidents involving officer vechiles.
Specific hazards, road conditions within your jurisdiction should be reviewed to determine what should be included in your layout.
Visit other sites of similar size and training requirements.
Annual training work flow should be determined.
How often will the range(s) be used and by how many students?
Have security, range management and maintenance costs been included?
Vehicle maintenance issues such as pre and post training inspections.
Will you have a dedicated training fleet?
Service and maintenance facilities, staff, equipment and supplies will be needed.
Budgets vs estimates vs actual costs
One of the biggest challenges for range construction is to get the project completed within the original approved budget. Too often, a budget gets approved based on a quick estimate without the benefit of planning and user input leaving the project to be adjusted and fit into a set amount. I call this working backwards.
The Project Management Institute (PMI) has some interesting definitions for project estimating.
Rough Order of Magnitude estimate – Based on little information early in the process and has an accuracy of +/- 50%.
Budget Estimate – Usually done after a planning phase but before design has started. It has an accuracy of -10% to +25%.
Definitive Estimate - is done during design and based on drawings and specifications. Its accuracy is -5% to +10%.
The challenge is to insure the approved budget includes design costs, construction (and change orders), miscellaneous items needed to begin operation/continuous operation, personnel, maintenance, supply costs. The more information available means a more accurate and reliable project budget.
Design Costs may include and environmental assessment, land surveys, soil borings, models, surface danger zones, noise study, drawings/specifications, construction inspections and meetings.
Construction costs include actual bricks and mortar, change orders, furniture/equipment, IT systems, road work, security fencing, gates, etc.
Operational costs may included simple stuff such as targets, ammunition, electricity, water and sewer service as well as additional personnel, maintenance tools, equipment and service contractors.
Another cost issue is what I call “User requested changes”. These are changes that occur during construction when someone changes their mind, forgot to ask a question or when politics dictate modifications.
Sometimes a range is budgeted to “get us going” then we can add stuff as needed. This thought process works until money is not available for a critical issue that can shut down training.
Site considerations
Driving ranges are intended to teach a student the physical limitations of a service vehicle; teach a student to understand their own personal abilities and limitations not only when driving and handling a motor vehicle but also their own emotional limitations when operating under stress.
In order to provide a safe environment for a student driver, care must be taken to allow for mistakes. Which means allowing plenty of safe zone space between the driving surface and ANY potential hazard.
Trees, wetlands, water bodies, buildings and other structures, ditches, rock outcrops and similar features present obstacles for site planning of a safe driving range.
Closed landfills, airports and other larger isolated tracts away from wetlands and water bodies are suggestions for where to look.
Design speeds are another consideration affecting site size. The higher the planned speeds, the more land will be needed. You can never have too much land.
Design decisions
Each project is unique with a specific set of training requirements, budget and site constraints. Many competing interests affect design decisions.
The most expensive decision in a driver training range project is designing to state highway department standards.
Range types:
Low speed non emergency vehicle operations (NEVO)
Skid control (wet surface)
High speed emergency response training
Many times a range layout is based on available space and configured with curves and other features that “fit” the available site.
Proper design should include historical research to determine the type of incidents occurring in your jurisdiction and including as many real world features as possible to address historical issues.
Intersection clearing is one of the most common issues so copying actual intersections from local areas make the best use of resources.
Another consideration is to duplicate venues such as intersections without using expensive equipment such as real traffic signal controls.
There are many inexpensive methods to create training scenarios using simple systems that are easy to repair and replace.
Safety distances and exposure to road side hazards are easy to overlook and expensive and time consuming to resolve after construction.
Desired training speeds will dictate straight road distances and ultimately site size. Or working backwards, a specific layout will allow for maximum speed based on available distances.
For example:
MPH FPS Distance traveled
in 5 seconds
35 51 256
50 73 366
65 95 476
80 117 586
100 147 733
Using the chart above, one can determine the straightway distance required to maintain a given speed or work backward to determine the speed for a given section of a range.
Environmental issues
Environmental awareness is a rapidly evolving social issue. Ever changing regulations continue to restrict activities that affect land use and development, generate noise, hazardous waste, impact occupational safety. The trend toward more restrictive regulations should be included in up front planning and design.
Wetlands – Jurisdictional boundaries of wetlands are governed by Federal, State and sometimes local regulations. They vary throughout the country and are continually be revised.
Storm water management is an increasing concern and a huge impact to large land use projects like driver training. In some locations, site requirements and related costs can have significant impacts to budgets and range layout.
An environmental assessment conducted after a site plan and design requirements have been developed will address all applicable regulations and allow for permitting to be done prior to completion of design.
Design firms (Choosing the right firm for your project)
Any design firm will can design a driver training range. However, to avoid expensive problems its better to pay a little more and hire a firm with experience. It will pay for itself at some point.
Design firms customarily charge 6-10% of construction estimate depending of site investigations, environmental work and other services during construction. An extra 2-3% spent to hire a proven design firm will avoid common issues discussed in this guide that can shut down training, take months/years to fix and cost significantly more than the design fee. Don’t risk your project on inexperience.
Most civil engineers have experience with public roadways but that does not translate to have the ability to design a safe and cost effective driver training range. There are too many examples of this to put in this document so I will just leave it with this.
Driver Training ranges and Public Roadway are not the same!
Typically project design occurs in phases:
Kickoff meeting and customer interviews
Concept design
50% design
90% design
Final Drawings and Specifications
At each phase (except final), the customer gets a chance to review drawings and meet with designers to address questions or issues.
One of the biggest challenges occurs because customers assume the designers know what they want and designers assume customers know what they want. Law Enforcement and Design professionals have different vocabularies where the same word often has two different meanings.
Design firms who have complete in-house set of engineering disciplines reduce the chance for coordination errors. Local firms who have outside engineering help often loose details in communication.
Many problems are not discovered until during construction when its expensive to fix.
A consultant who understands this potential communication gap will pay for itself by identifying confusing areas and working through them to insure everyone understands what is being put on drawings and specs.
3-D modeling can be an opportunity to discover visual obstructions before they become expensive construction problems.
Administrative controls
When something goes wrong we are quick to look for blame. “The range is unsafe” “Conditions are unsafe”, “We can’t train until the range is made safe” and so on…
No inanimate object is capable of being safe or unsafe by itself. Only human action can created conditions defined as safe or unsafe. That’s where administrative controls come in.
Laws of Physics dictate speeds through a turn no matter how much runoff pavement is added.
There must be rules in place to govern use of any training activity.
Proper validation of a new range will help determine maximum speeds and other safety controls needed.
Safety of the students and instructor as well as unassociated individuals nearby or far away can be affected.
Uncontrolled use of the range by qualified personnel can result in injury, damage and law suits.
During my career of over 30 years, the vast majority of the “unsafe” conditions investigated were caused by inappropriate or unauthorized behavior of students or instructors. The rest were construction defects or maintenance failures. The point here is no amount of construction, repair, rework or renovation will compensate for improper use.
The best design and construction techniques must accompany strict administrative controls to safely operating any training range.
What can go wrong?
I could write book on examples of design decisions and planning that resulted in expensive repairs and rework. This section is best taken advantage of by hiring an experience consultant who can help minimize problems.
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© 2013 | J. Robert Jones, Jr., P.E., LLC
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