> We don't have center line monuments around here, ....
>
> -Jeff
Never figgured out why the rest of the country puts them right in the middle of the road????
um.. he gave you fifteen cents..... just sayin' :-/
Well smarten up then!
I hear that except that I notice they don't pave over their water valves, sewer manholes, storm manholes, telephone manholes and all of the other various boxes out there.
The attitude contractors and engineers have towards monuments is it isn't a big deal to put them back as they destroy everything in the entire neighborhood. Even when they know they are there the City Engineer told a contractor not to worry about the pipes in the centerline. A local LS threatened to file a complaint against the City Engineers PE license which finally got some action on preserving monuments.
"...who cares if the city tears out these "precious" monuments..."
You should - its part of your responsibility as a registrant/licensee to protect the public! Oops - forgot about that in your me, me, me world, huh? What a piss-poor attitude and lack of understanding!
> Never figured out why the rest of the country puts them right in the middle of the road
The "why" is easy -- in most subdivisions, if you can nail down the centerline of the road you can determine where the lot corners are with a high degree of certainty. Centerline monuments are basically subdivision control monuments. And in the areas of California where I work, lot corner monuments often fall victim to fence, utility and landscaping activity.
The "how" is where the wheels come off. Monuments driven directly into the pavement (pipes, rebars, nails) tend not to survive road maintenance and reconstruction activities, while those placed in a monument well generally weather those intact. Unfortunately, in many jurisdictions monument wells aren't required because they cost more up front, but it's a false economy when viewed in the long term.
If you're dealing with unpaved roads, then the situation changes. In that circumstance, lot corner monuments probably stand a better chance of surviving than near-surface centerline marks, and they're a whole lot easier to recover than deep centerline monuments.
You're right about protecting the public. I hate when points are missing too. I was only trying to make the point that that is part of our of job. If it were so easy to re-establish points than we may as well have the grading contractors measure the public's boundaries.
To be fair to you all out west, most of our points in the colonial states are not in middle of the road, so I probably don't deal with as much as you. Have a great weekend -- I have to get back to building a college fund. B-)
I'll remember that next time I drive over a crappy cold-patch job.
Generally I don't like to bury monuments because that kind of defeats the whole purpose of a monument.
Sometimes, however, the situation calls for it. I wanted to set a line monument where the line crosses a gravel forest road. There is evidence the road and ditches are occasionally bladed for maintenance. So we selected what we though would be the safest spot and buried it a foot down. We put BT tags on nearby trees and blazed a line tree. Hopefully it will survive. I showed it to the neighbor who is really aware of where her boundary is located.
I have seen that note too or something similar to it but it does not do a damn bit of good. I had a county engineer tell me to my face that it would cost "way to much to survey all of the monuments prior to construction and then replace them after." When I asked him about all of the block corners that his new sidewalk was destroying he just shrugged and walked away. That is the problem, no one cares about this except us. Well, some of us.
Well smarten up then! - Perry
The C/L is the best place for control monuments. Once the street improvements are done the monuments are then set. The surface of the street should last at least 40 years before it needs a resurface. The C/L monuments are also tied out with reference points in the curb, in Los Angeles County it is a minimum of four ties per point. These are placed normal to BC - EC's of curves and on C/L tangents produced.
The sidelines of a street has more private construction activity over the years and any monuments on those lines will get destroyed a lot earlier.
When was the last time you ever had to dig up a street to recover a monument Perry?
This method has served Los Angeles County quite well for over 100 years, do you have a better method of placing original control in your area?
> So we selected what we though would be the safest spot and buried it a foot down.
I've done it, too, but only when there's no better option available. The last time was about 5 years ago near Dunnigan, where I recovered a couple of monuments 1.5' +/- below grade in a gravel county road. The ground was pretty hard, and I didn't want the next guy to have to work as much as I did, so I tied them out, drove 3/4" x 30" steel bars with aluminum caps next to the found monuments -- adjusting the bars so the centers of the caps were over the lower monuments and 6" below grade -- and filled the holes up to the caps with concrete. I figure that the periodic regrading probably won't go down as far as the caps, and if they do manage to wipe out the concreted bars the originals will still be lurking below.
I think your assumption that monument destruction would result in more work is not necessarily true.
If all of the control in a neighborhood is wiped out then the sticker shock for any given survey request may just eliminate surveys from happening.
If we actually had a viable network of publicly maintained control monuments then there should be more work because the cost of any given survey would be within reach of the average client. Then there are the jobs for the public employees (or in some cases contractors) that maintain the network. Skelton made this suggestion way back in 1930 and we still haven't implemented it, for the most part.
Los Angeles County had a pretty good program up until the 1970s or 80s (I think) when budget realities started to erode it.
> The "why" is easy -- in most subdivisions, if you can nail down the centerline of the road you can determine where the lot corners are with a high degree of certainty. Centerline monuments are basically subdivision control monuments. And in the areas of California where I work, lot corner monuments often fall victim to fence, utility and landscaping activity.
>
If you monument the street sidelines as we do in Mass, these monuments are basically the the subdivision control. In my experiance, 6"x6"x48" granite, set 2" below grade are as adequate as monumentation in the street.
Well smarten up then! - Perry
>
>
> When was the last time you ever had to dig up a street to recover a monument Perry?
>
> a?
Never. We're smart enough to keep them out of the ROW. Frost would probably raise heck with them anyway.
Well smarten up then! - Perry
> The C/L is the best place for control monuments.
Only a surveyor would say that. Pretty much everybody else thinks it's a bad idea. The primary intent of a road is not to create a convenient place to put a monument.
Well smarten up then! - Perry
I like placing original control at the lot corners and road change of direction points. Centerline monuments, in those cool little boxes would be nice, but it won't happen around here.
Most of the general public like to see their corners!
Well smarten up then! - Perry
Jeesh Don, putting the monumentation on the edge of the road has worked pretty well for nearly four hundred years in your part of the state.;-)
Well smarten up then! - Perry
> Only a surveyor would say that.
Umm..depends on where they practice, but overall, I would say you are correct.
>Pretty much everybody else thinks it's a bad idea.
As in Non Surveyor types?
Well smarten up then! - Perry
> > When was the last time you ever had to dig up a street to recover a monument Perry?
> Never. We're smart enough to keep them out of the ROW. Frost would probably raise heck with them anyway.
Ohh My Bad! I did not know that frost upheave stops on a R/W sideline. Learn something new everyday.
Well smarten up then! - Perry
WWHDTD?
What would Henry David Thoreau do?