Scoping is a process that develops the budget, schedule, and explicit rationale for a transportation infrastructure project. Detailed interviews with Virginia scoping professionals provide a unique occasion to investigate challenges and potential improvements in this field. Problems include lack of a clear purpose statement from the planning process; incongruence between planning cost estimates and scoping estimates; scoping of projects not having full construction funding; insufficient participation from outside agencies; and insufficient documentation of follow-up commitments fulfilled after the scope is established. Solutions focused on process rather than technology and include distinguishing the prescoping meeting (where questions are raised) from the scoping meeting (where questions are answered), providing an accounting mechanism allowing some scoping to be performed prior to programming, and strengthening the link between scoping and planning. This article further suggests that scoping substantially influences a project’s achievement of desired transportation outcomes.
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