Profiting From Lessons Learned on a Subway : Transportation: With the first 4.4-mile segment of the Metro Red Line nearly complete, planners hope to save time and money on subsequent phases by avoiding earlier mistakes.

When Los Angeles set out to build its first modern subway six years ago, the project’s engineers thought it best to break down its massive station- and tunnel-building contracts into several stages and bundle up its complex communications network into one big job.

Now, with the first 4.4-mile segment of the Metro Red Line nearly complete and scheduled to open in March, the engineers realize that those decisions were wrong.

Months of delay and tens of millions of dollars in extra costs were racked up in the first phase of the project because it was much harder than expected to coordinate the work of rival contractors working on the same stations and tunnel segments. Integrating nine fire, safety and communications systems into one package was harder still.

As the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission embarks on the second phase of one of the costliest and most complicated public works projects in the nation’s history, planners at the transportation commission’s Rail Construction Corp. subsidiary are trying to save time and money by learning from their mistakes. This time they plan to build the stations and tunnels in big pieces and have several contractors assemble a communications network from components.

Engineers have for decades learned from mistakes--others’ as well as their own. That was one reason why the Southern California Rapid Transit District opted for smaller contracts and phased construction, to try to avoid the massive overruns experienced in other cities when whole transportation systems were built at once by a handful of contractors.

But the RCC is so intent on capitalizing on its earlier mistakes that it has developed a formalized program called Lessons Learned, in which regular meetings and routinely circulated written reports allow almost anyone on the project to share cost-saving and timesaving tips.

The program seems to be working. Digging under Wilshire Boulevard is a month ahead of schedule. Tunnelers average 70 feet a day now, compared with the 33 feet a day averaged in the first phase. And no workday has been lost to contractor-management disputes so far in this phase, compared to 614 days lost over the same period during construction downtown.

“We really have an opportunity here to get smarter,” said RCC President Edward McSpedon. “. . Usually, you learn a lot during a job and know all there is to know by the time you finish. But by then it’s too late to apply those lessons. With this project, we have a chance to get better.”

Snaking 30 miles of twin-bore tunnels through the tar pits, sewer pipes, buried cables and leaky gasoline tanks that lie under the city will never be easy, said construction-management consultant Robert E. Smith. But the Red Line’s phased building process offers a “remarkable and unique opportunity” to cut down on inefficiency.

“Here, where (the phases) are all similar and repetitive, we felt it represented a great opportunity to learn and improve,” said Smith, who works for Hill International, a private consultant hired by the Federal Transit Administration to monitor how well federal grants are spent in the subway project.

Perhaps the biggest lesson was learned when a fire burned the temporary timber supports in a tunnel under the Hollywood Freeway in 1989. The freeway did not collapse, as was feared, but the RCC has since forsaken timber supports in favor of precast concrete rings.

Smith said the greatest potential for savings comes from the RCC decision to consolidate seven small tunnel-segment contracts into two larger projects.

When the first phase was being designed, contractors were often hired to build tunnels only from one station to the next, leaving the stations themselves for other contractors. The idea was to keep contracts small enough to attract a lot of bidders, with the resulting competition keeping down costs.

What engineers found, however, was that most of the interested bidders were companies large enough to handle several tunnel contracts simultaneously, a development that led to unexpected inefficiency.

One joint venture, Shank-Ohbayashi, won contracts to dig the tunnels on each side of the Metro Center station downtown. However, it was not one of the two contractors involved in building and equipping the station.

As a result, when the firm’s underground digging machine reached the future station site, the contractor had to disassemble the massive device, then truck the parts 800 feet to the other end of the station site, where it reassembled the machine in a freshly dug shaft.

That costly process took five weeks, almost as long as it would have taken to simply bore right through the station site--a more productive use of time that at least would have started excavation of the underground station.

McSpedon said he was determined not to repeat such experiences when the RCC took over construction management from the Rapid Transit District two years ago.

The new approach consolidates the tunnel contracts into one project, with one other general contractor “dropping in” the subterranean stations later on. If the contractor building the Wilshire/Vermont station is able to dig the station and bore through the westbound tunnel as planned, the tunneling machine would reach the partially dug station just in time to drive through the opening, saving many thousands of dollars in labor and overhead costs.

This idea was not proposed in time to be incorporated into the bidding on the subway’s second phase, which tunnels beneath Wilshire Boulevard in the Westlake District. Coincidentally, however, Tutor-Saliba/Perini of Sylmar was awarded all four contracts, giving the engineers a chance to test their thesis--and giving Tutor a chance to make a lot of money if it can make the consolidated tunneling work smoothly.

“It’s a great situation for us,” McSpedon said. “The contractor is chasing himself.”

The Rail Construction Corp. is taking the process one step further in the third subway phase, to Hollywood. There, three large contracts have been combined into one of the largest tunneling projects launched at a single site, a $170-million supertunnel project consisting of twin bores, 22 feet in diameter and about six miles long.

“In this heavy civil (engineering) stuff, bigger is better,” McSpedon said. “It is very labor-intensive and it takes time to build an experienced tunnel team; once you have them out there, you want to keep them out there.”

Strategic construction planning is not the only area in which the RCC has learned lessons, and the Red Line subway is not the only place in which to learn them. While building the Long Beach-to-Los Angeles Blue Line, the Rail Construction Corp. learned to buy selected supplies in bulk--and the bulkier the better.

Concrete railroad ties are one example. The RCC bought enough for the Blue Line and for the El Segundo-to-Norwalk Green Line, getting a volume discount in the process. Before the Green Line project got under way, a temporary shortage of high-quality ties let the RCC sell its supply at a profit. After prices fell, it replenished its stock.

Even management policy and organizational structures have come in for reconsideration. Decision-making authority for many small construction problems has been decentralized. Resident engineers at each job site have been told to consider contractors as partners rather than adversaries.

Joel Sandberg, the Rail Construction Corp. engineer who manages the second phase of Red Line construction, said this has saved considerable time and money by allowing instant decisions in the field. In the first phase, workers often stopped digging, waiting for decisions from the front office.

Now, Sandberg said, resident engineers have the authority to approve changes that cost as much as $25,000--although they must be able to justify the costs later.

“We realized that our resident engineers weren’t just construction inspectors,” McSpedon said. “They are essentially running $40-million and $50-million businesses for us out there. So we gave them the authority needed to do it right.”

Much work lies ahead before the true value of the lessons learned can be judged, Smith said. He added that there are always developments unique to each phase that can further strain budgets.

Hill International has warned federal officials that the budget and schedule of the Hollywood subway were cast into doubt by LACTC and RCC board decisions to redesign the Hollywood stations--just as construction was set to begin.

Hill noted in its most recent monthly report that the new designs and the resulting delays have added tens of millions of dollars to the $1.45-billion budget for the second phase.

Yet subway construction officials have even learned lessons from that situation. They are drafting a standardized design that they could use for every new station built as subway lines spread east and west and maybe even across the San Fernando Valley. The move would eliminate the need for policy decisions by the boards on every stop.

“It is,” Sandberg said, “the first lesson learned on Segment 2.”