Just had a call from a customer letting us know that someone from the Va. Dept. of Transportation told one of his employees at the subdivision we recently installed signs that the signs we installed last week were all on VDOT Right of Way.
I called Fralin and Waldron to try and get to the bottom of this. I personally put the flags up in the locations (agreed upon by customer and myself several weeks back) so Sign Design is "at fault" for getting the signs too close to the ROW and therefore we would normally be responsible for moving them out of harms way. (By that I mean that signs in the state ROW are sometimes removed by state crews and taken to storage somewhere in Salem). I think that this is mainly because the state is maintaining the ROW and these signs are in the way of mowing operations or sight distances etc.
The customer is doing us a favor by having his men move the signs back to 5 feet behind the curb. Apparently one of the VDOT boys told his man that having them 5 feet behind the curb will take them out of the ROW.
This may or may not be true since the ROW normally includes all of the street improvements (back of curb to back of curb) plus additional room for storm sewers etc. For instance the back of curb to back of curb measurement at this particular subdivision may be 35 feet, but the ROW may be 50 feet. In a perfect world, there would be 7 -1/2 feet behind the curb to the ROW. I have been told that sometimes the actual road improvements are not centered within the ROW- but usually they are.
The bottom line is this-
If we do not have a dimensional site plan of the area so we can actually scale the location of the ROW from some known object like a curb or a drop inlet, we really do not know where that line is. Nor does anyone else except a surveyor. We should advise our customer that they need to have their signs off of the ROW, but ultimately we should put them where the customers ask us to. JUST BE SURE WE ADVISE THE CUSTOMER CORRECTLY.
No comments:
Post a Comment