The Hidden Infrastructure Challenge
The public right-of-way is a modern marvel. Beneath our streets, more than 2.2 million miles of pipeline delivers clean drinking water across the United States—and that figure reflects potable water alone. Add gas, electric, telecommunications, traffic systems, transit infrastructure, and other buried and surface assets, and the density within a single street cross-section reflects an impressive level of complexity built over decades of investment.
At the surface, these same corridors support daily movement. People walk and bike. Vehicles, deliveries, and transit move through constrained space. Construction, maintenance, and public events compete for access. Together, these uses make the right-of-way the connective tissue of modern life.
Rights-of-way serve a dual purpose. They house essential infrastructure while functioning as shared public space for mobility, commerce, recreation, and civic activity. Ensuring all of this operates safely and reliably falls to the professionals who oversee right-of-way activity.
Managing the right-of-way is complex. Every excavation, lane closure, or permitted event often reflects months or years of planning and coordination. Public agencies, utilities, contractors, and private partners must align people, projects, assets, locations, access, regulations, workflows, and schedules long before any activity reaches the street. When coordination falls short, the effects are immediate.
Work and disruptions multiply. Risks and costs escalate.
Even well-managed agencies with established policies, pavement moratoriums, and permitting controls struggle to balance right-of-way activity at scale. When work is planned or approved in isolation, predictable consequences follow.
For the public and the street:
- Safety risks increase for pedestrians and cyclists.
- Mobility declines for people, deliveries, transit, and freight.
- Traffic congestion grows as detours multiply.
- Emergency responders lose predictable access to critical corridors.
- Parking access becomes constrained.
- Noise, dust, and construction linger.
- Businesses lose frontage exposure and foot traffic.
For agencies and operators:
- Construction and maintenance schedules conflict in timing, staging, or access.
- Events overlap with planned closures or traffic control plans.
- Traffic control and detour plans conflict across adjacent projects or agencies.
- Unplanned work disrupts carefully sequenced capital and maintenance programs.
- Costs increase threatening financial stability of both public and private operators.
Frequent work zones contribute to the perception that road construction never ends, and what begins as an inconvenience quickly escalates into a broader mobility, safety, and economic issue.
The Measurable Cost of Poor Coordination
Across the public sector, it is well understood that repeated utility cuts into pavement degrade asset performance and shorten lifecycle expectancy. Decades of pavement management research and practical experience show that each cut accelerates deterioration and can lead to costly premature repair and street remediation expenses.
The financial effect is cumulative. Network condition declines. Maintenance backlogs grow. Capital programs are forced into perpetual catch-up mode. Over time, the total cost of ownership for pavement assets becomes unsustainable, placing increasing pressure on limited capital and operating budgets.
In response, many pavement owners have adopted higher permit fees, moratoriums, and restoration penalties to recover a portion of these costs. While these measures can help offset financial losses, they do not address the underlying logistical and operational challenges of right-of-way management. Increased fees treat the symptom, not the cause.
Utility cuts will always be required. When they occur, best practice is to minimize their impact in a way that delivers the highest return on investment for the agency, the utility, and the public.
Achieving this requires addressing the lack of shared visibility into four critical aspects of right-of-way coordination:
- Who needs access to the right-of-way?
- What activity is planned?
- Where will it occur?
- When does it need to happen?
From Siloed Effort to a Shared Discipline
Right-of-way challenges persist not because they are misunderstood, but because responsibility and data are fragmented across multiple internal and external stakeholders.
For years, agencies managed this complexity through sheer effort. Coordination relied on meetings, emails, spreadsheets, custom applications, and institutional knowledge to keep work aligned. While these approaches can work in isolation, they do not scale easily and struggle to keep pace with the volume, speed, and interdependence of modern right-of-way activity.
As agencies encountered these limits, right-of-way management began to evolve. What was once a collection of disconnected tasks matured into a discipline—one grounded in shared visibility, intentional planning, and cross-agency coordination.
Leading agencies formalized this shift by establishing the governance models, processes, and collaborative practices needed to manage the right-of-way as a shared system rather than a series of individual projects.
Today, this approach increasingly defines how modern agencies operate.
AtomAI Helps Agencies Put Coordination into Practice
What agencies need is not more policy or more effort, but a way to operationalize coordination at scale.
AtomAI pioneered modern right-of-way coordination technology in partnership with the City of Chicago, where the scale and complexity of street work demanded a fundamentally different approach. That collaboration helped establish a new model for managing right-of-way activity—one grounded in shared, map-based visibility across location and time while remaining intuitive and easy to use.
The Chicago experience reinforces a core principle: right-of-way coordination works best when all stakeholders operate from a common spatial view of planned activity.
Built on Google Maps, AtomAI’s Coordinate Platform works across organizational boundaries, integrates with existing systems, and automatically identifies conflicts early in the planning cycle. This allows agencies to proactively align projects and events before they reach the street.
Public-facing portals extend this visibility further, allowing residents and businesses to view planned projects, understand anticipated impacts, and subscribe to notifications. This transparency improves communication, sets clearer expectations, and builds public trust.
By aligning the who, what, where and when of each right-of-way activity, Chicago eliminates redundant construction, avoids re-excavation, and improves transparency across projects—resulting in more than $170 million in avoided construction costs.
Why Right-of-Way Coordination Matters More Than Ever
Right-of-way coordination will always be complex—but the consequences of getting it wrong continue to escalate. As the built environment expands and communities demand more transparency and faster delivery with fewer disruptions, right-of-way coordination remains a critical pressure point within asset management and capital planning programs.
Agencies are being asked to deliver more work, align across more stakeholders, and do it with constrained staffing, tighter budgets, and rising public expectations.
Sustaining this work requires purpose-built software.
A platform that centralizes data, automates communication and empowers limited teams to manage the operational complexity of the public right-of-way. By easing the day-to-day coordination burden, technology enables public stewards to move beyond traditional methods and establish intentional, system-level coordination that can scale with the demands placed on today’s infrastructure.
Key benefits include:
- Safer field operations enabled by shared awareness of planned activity.
- More predictable delivery through earlier alignment across teams and partners.
- Longer asset life driven by fewer repeated cuts and premature degradation.
- Lower lifecycle costs by avoiding rework and accelerated reinvestment.
- Greater operational efficiency by maximizing limited staff capacity.
- Stronger financial outcomes by ensuring each project delivers durable value.
- Improved public trust through transparency and reduced disruption.
When teams align activities, day-to-day field decisions reinforce long-term asset performance, financial outcomes, and positive community impact—upholding the fundamental purpose of the right-of-way: to house essential infrastructure and keep people, goods, and services moving safely.
Book a demo to learn how shared visibility supports better decisions, stronger financial stewardship, and more resilient infrastructure.
