Service area
Tight city sites where access and planning matter as much as the paving itself.
San Francisco is part of our service area. Paving in the city comes with its own problems, and very few of them have to do with the asphalt.
Sites are tight, there's rarely room to stage equipment or material, streets are narrow and busy, grades are steep, and almost anything touching the public right-of-way needs a permit and a traffic control plan. We plan and price city work around those conditions from the start, so you get a realistic number up front instead of a suburban rate that changes later.
On the ground
Local conditions, not a template with the place name swapped in.
On a suburban parking lot, crew size and production rate set the schedule. In San Francisco, access does.
When a truck can't get close to the work, there's no room to stage material, or deliveries have to be timed around street conditions, logistics become the main challenge. A small city job can take longer than a much larger suburban one. We price that in from the start.
Asphalt has to arrive within its placement temperature range and be compacted before it cools. That takes planning everywhere, and even more in the city.
Traffic delays, limited delivery windows and trucks that can't wait at the curb all make it harder to keep material hot. Staging deliveries so asphalt arrives hot and in order makes a bigger difference to quality here than on almost any other kind of site.
San Francisco's hills are steep enough to change how a surface is built and how water runs off it. On a steep approach, the transitions at the gutter line and entry apron matter more than they do on flat ground.
The marine layer also shortens the working day. Cool, damp mornings delay the start of seal coat work, and the window for placing and curing material is narrower than it is just a few miles inland.
Work affecting sidewalks, curb lines or roadways usually requires permits and an approved traffic control plan before we mobilize. We build that lead time into the schedule from the start.
The same care applies to private sites in the city. On our 226 13th Street project in downtown Oakland, meeting the city's DOT requirements while keeping public access open at all times shaped the whole job. San Francisco work is usually much the same, if not more so. Our crews have also worked in the city itself, including at Oracle Park.
Tight sites make accessible routes harder to get right. Where space is limited, cross slopes drift out of tolerance and paths of travel get interrupted by level changes.
California's Unruh Civil Rights Act attaches statutory damages of at least $4,000 per violation, plus attorney's fees, to conditions that don't meet accessibility requirements. In a city with heavy foot traffic and lots of public accommodations, that exposure is real. Our ADA improvements page covers what the fixes involve.
Questions
Yes, San Francisco is in our service area. Most of our published projects are in the East Bay, North Bay and Peninsula, so feel free to ask for city-specific references when you reach out.
Because access, staging and permits, not square footage, decide how long the work takes. A tight site with no lay-down area and limited delivery windows costs more per square foot than an open suburban lot. We'd rather give you a realistic price up front than surprise you with a revised one later.
Work touching the public right-of-way requires permits and an approved traffic control plan, and we build that lead time into the schedule. Talk to us early, since it's often the longest item on the calendar.
Every project in San Francisco is run from Forticon's office at 1300 Clay Street, Suite 600, Oakland, CA 94612 · (510) 328-3230
Get started
Send the address and what you are seeing. An estimator will walk the site and tell you what is actually failing before quoting anything.