Paving takeoff that
reads the section.

The area is the easy part

Measuring the paved area of a lot is the part anyone can do — and it's the part that tells you the least. A paving bid lives in the pavement section details, the striping and signage plan, the curb-and-gutter schedule, the ADA accessibility details and the demolition notes that decide milling versus full-depth removal. Those sit on civil sheets, in detail callouts, and in keynotes scattered across the set, and the real cost only resolves when you read the area against the section that applies to it. The lot you measured in five minutes carries an hour of section reading, striping counting and curb sorting behind it, and that hour is where the bid is won or lost. Pilars measures every paved zone off the civil sheets, matches each zone to its pavement section, and returns asphalt and concrete by depth, plus base, striping, curb and accessibility scope.

Where paving bids actually leak

It's the things that aren't the big asphalt number. The section detail changes depth by zone — heavy-duty pavement at the truck routes and drive aisles, standard-duty in the stalls — and a takeoff that applies one depth to the whole lot is wrong on both sides. Striping and signage counts get skipped because they're tedious, even though they're a real line. Curb and gutter linear footage gets traced as one number when the plan actually calls barrier curb, mountable curb, ribbon curb and valley gutter as separate items. The ADA ramps and detectable warning panels — a scope with real liability — hide in the accessibility details. And the demolition notes quietly decide whether you're milling and overlaying or removing and replacing, which is a different machine, a different crew and a different number.

Pilars reads all of it off the civil set. It applies section depth by zone, counts stalls, arrows and signs, traces curb by type, flags the ADA ramps and warning panels, and separates the milling areas from the full-depth scopes per the demo notes. Each quantity is tied to where it came from on the sheet, so a depth that looks wrong points you straight to the section it was read from.

• Asphalt and concrete area by pavement section, depth applied by zone
• Aggregate base depth read from the section, returned as tons or CY
• Striping, arrows, accessible symbols and signage counted off the striping plan
• Curb and gutter LF separated by type against the legend
• ADA ramps and detectable warning panels flagged from the accessibility details
• Milling vs full-depth overlay scopes split from the demolition notes

The tonnage math, done off the plan

Every paving estimator runs the same conversion, and it's where transcription errors creep in: area times depth times a unit weight, lift by lift. Asphalt is roughly 110 pounds per square yard per inch of compacted thickness, so a 4-inch section over 10,000 square yards is on the order of 4,400 tons before you even split the binder and surface lifts. Pilars does that arithmetic from the measured area and the section depth automatically — by zone, by lift — so you get tonnage you can hand to the plant instead of a spreadsheet you re-check three times. Concrete paving comes back as cubic yards from area and slab thickness, and base comes back in tons or cubic yards from the section the same way.

Because the depth comes from the section detail rather than a single assumption, the heavy-duty zones and the standard-duty zones tonnage out separately, which is exactly how the asphalt gets priced and ordered. It also keeps the waste and compaction factors honest: when you can see the tonnage broken down by zone and lift, the haul count and the number of trucks you need to schedule stop being a back-of-the-envelope guess. The numbers stay traceable: every ton ties back to an area and a section, so when the spec changes a depth you re-run the affected zone instead of the whole lot.

Honest about what it is

Pilars reads 2D civil and site plans — the same sheets and details you bid from today. It is not a survey, it does not generate quantities that aren't on the drawings, and where the demo notes are ambiguous about milling versus removal it surfaces the ambiguity rather than guessing. You stay the estimator. What changes is that reading the section against the area, counting the striping, separating the curb types and running the tonnage all happen in minutes, with every number traceable to the sheet it came from.

Pricing is the other honest part: $100 per trade, per plan. No per-seat licenses, no annual contract, unlimited projects. Run it on your own civil set in the demo and check the tonnage against your last bid before you decide anything.

Questions estimators actually ask