AACE is excited to share a new membership benefit – the AACE Transit Forum! The AACE Transit Forum is a thought leadership community dedicated to AACE members that are active in the transit sector. It serves as a think tank and a gathering space for cost engineering and project controls professionals within the transit sector, to work together to address common challenges, share experiences, solutions, resources, lessons learned, and gain additional insights from experts in the field. The AACE Transit Forum will hold quarterly meetings (3 virtual meetings during the span of the year and one in-person meeting at the AACE Annual Conference & Expo). Each meeting will feature a topic led by a transit agency and will tackle issues that are most relevant to the transit sector.
About Sound Transit
Sound Transit (ST) is a public transit agency serving the Seattle metropolitan area in the U.S. state of Washington. It operates the Link light rail system in Seattle and Tacoma, regional Sounder commuter rail, and Sound Transit Express bus service. The agency also coordinates the regional ORCA fare card system, which is also used by local transit operators. In 2019, Sound Transit services carried a total of 48 million passengers and averaged over 161,000 riders on weekdays.
About This Sessions Topic
Sound Transit will lead the first discussion to share industry insights and research from the Sound Transit Technical Advisory Group’s report: Improving the Speed of Project Delivery. A key recommendation in the report was the need to align key procedures with industry best practices, eliminating unnecessary steps and associated delays. Two of the key procedures highlighted are: change management and pay application processing.
To understand industry best practices related to invoice payment timelines and change order management processes, Sound Transit is partnering with other transportation agencies to conduct an evaluation of internal contract processes, including invoice payment timeline and change order management. Agencies will be asked to share their current capital program total process time for pay applications, total and segmented process time for construction change management, and policies and processes that are relevant to the internal management of these contract activities.