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BUSINESS NEWS T.Y. LIN INTERNATIONAL WINS 2016 HONOR AWARDS FOR TILIKUM CROSSING, BRIDGE OF THE PEOPLE AND PORT MANN BRIDGE FROM ACEC T.Y. Lin International , a globally recognized full-service infrastructure consulting firm, announced that two of its major bridge projects, Tilikum Crossing, Bridge of the People in Portland, Oregon, and the Port Mann Bridge in Vancouver, British Columbia, have received 2016 Engineering Excellence Honor Awards from the ACEC. TYLI and the firm’s project partners accepted the awards at ACEC’s Engineering Excellence Awards Gala. “T.Y. Lin International has had the privilege of designing some of the world’s most important and iconic bridges. We are tremendously pleased that the American Council of Engineering Companies has honored our work on Tilikum Crossing, Bridge of the People and the Port Mann Bridge,” said David Goodyear, P.E., S.E., PEng, TYLI senior vice president and chief bridge engineer. “These two projects demonstrate how the application of innovative engineering solutions, along with an unprecedented level of cooperation and collaboration between design-build teams and their respective project owners, can solve project challenges and advance the bridge design industry.”

Located in Portland, Oregon, and the nation’s largest transit-only bridge, Tilikum Crossing is the first major bridge in the U.S. dedicated to progressive, alternative solutions to meet urban transportation needs. TYLI was charged with satisfying special transit design, seismic design, and aesthetic design requirements established by TriMet for this project, including the form of the bridge, the towers, and the stay-cables. To control such unique design conditions, the firm designed the bridge as a hybrid between a traditional cable-stayed layout and an extradosed bridge. The visually striking structure features two 180-foot-tall stay-cable towers and two landside piers. Taken together with the flatter rise of the cables, the modern profile of Tilikum Crossing reflects the slopes of the Cascade Mountains, which provide the visual backdrop for the bridge when looking toward the triangular form of Mount Hood. TYLI engineers also introduced numerous value engineering concepts to reduce project costs. These included optimizing the foundation system by reducing the number and size of drilled shafts, and providing a superior, cost-effective, alternative seismic design solution that removed the need to stabilize the soil or handle hazardous materials on the west approach.

The Port Mann Bridge in Vancouver, British Columbia, is the centerpiece of the Port Mann Bridge/Highway 1 Improvement Project, the largest transportation infrastructure project in the history of the Canadian province to address escalating traffic congestion throughout Greater Vancouver. The bridge project includes the 850-meter-long crossing over the Fraser River, a 350-meter-long segmental box girder south approach in Surrey, and an 820-meter-long segmental box girder north approach in Coquitlam. Carrying 10 vehicle lanes (five lanes in each direction) and a barrier-separated bicycle-pedestrian path, the Port Mann Bridge now reduces drive time for its users by as much as 50 percent. TYLI’s innovative design for the Port Mann Bridge enabled a new 10-lane span within the right-of-way allowed for the five-lane twinned bridge envisioned in TI Corp’s reference documents. The bridge also features a clean, dramatic profile, with two 163-meter-high single mast concrete towers and a three-span superstructure that is a composition of two separate, five-lane deck structures separated by a median where the towers are located. Each deck structure has two planes of stay cables that are supported off of a single central pylon.

CHRISTINA ZWEIG, from page 9

inbound marketing? 1)Not understanding what is “valuable” content. For this to work, your firm has to create something useful. A press release on a new hire is not valuable content. I’m not recom- mending you don’t ever send these out, but they won’t work as the cornerstone of your inbound marketing campaign. “Inbound marketing really works when this content is not only virally shared, but so incredibly wonderful that people are willing to give up something for it – their personal information.” 2)Not following up. Once you start finding out who is inter- ested in you, you have to follow up, and follow up in the right way. It’s unlikely that a random person who was forwarded an email is going to immediately call you looking to give you work. They will need more exposure over time. Continue to impress them with more useful content (see #1). 3)Not closing the deal. At some point, you need to have some- one good who can sell your work. While the term “inbound marketing” may be long gone five years from now, the idea that you want to find ways to draw potential clients to your firm is not something that is going to go away anytime soon. So give it a try, you don’t have much to lose. CHRISTINA ZWEIG is Zweig Group’s director of research and marketing. Contact her at christinaz@zweiggroup.com.

Inbound marketing really works when this content is not only virally shared, but so incredibly wonderful that people are willing to give up something for it – their personal information. By hiding parts of this content behind forms, or dazzling them with something so interesting right from the start that they are willing to give you their information in the hopes of receiving something similar in the future, you can effectively begin to collect names and addresses of people who have a much higher likelihood to use your firm than others. From this point, firms should have a growing list of potentially interested clients coming to them, but the work isn’t over. All these potential clients have to be followed up with and, ideally, consistently impressed with more content. From this point on, much like outbound marketing, firms have to close the deal, and do the job. Make something cool, put it on the internet, collect information from people who are interested in it, give them more, get them to share it, collect new information, follow up, and repeat over and over. Inbound marketing really isn’t that difficult. So where do firms in the A/E industry go wrong with “The key to creating valuable content is putting yourself in your clients’ shoes and understanding what interests them.”

THE ZWEIG LETTER June 13, 2016, ISSUE 1156

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