About
Built because the PDFs were unbearable.
IDOT has published awarded prices for every letting since 2003. The data is public, it is complete, and it is almost unusable — spread across hundreds of files in three different formats, with a report layout that changed twice, and no way to ask it a question.
So estimators do what they have always done: dig through a few lettings, guess at inflation, call someone who might remember, and round up.
BidParser is that pile of files, parsed and made answerable.
What that took
Three parsers, because IDOT bid tabs come off a mainframe in fixed-width columns, ISTHA publishes CSV, and the awarded-price reports changed shape twice between 2018 and 2023.
Some of the work is unglamorous and matters more than the rest. In 2023 IDOT started publishing one row per bidder rather than one row per award, marking the winner in a column that is easy to drop. Treating every row as an award overstates recent prices by about a third on the items where it happens — and recent prices are exactly the ones weighted most heavily. Awards are separated from losing bids, and only awards go into a price.
Legacy files had pay item codes parsed as numbers somewhere upstream, so 20200100 was stored as 20200100.0 and split a 24-year history into two unconnected halves. That is fixed too.
Where it stands
- Awarded items
- 1,066,388
- Pay items
- 33,166
- Contracts
- 21,259
- Span
- 2003–2026
New lettings load within about a week of IDOT publishing them.
Company
BidParser is built by Bucket 6 Inc., the software business of Orange Chair Corporation, an Illinois corporation. Bucket 6 is the name on your receipt; Orange Chair Corporation is the company you are contracting with.
We also build AssetLink, asset management for municipalities — a different product for a different buyer, sharing nothing but the plumbing underneath.
Questions, corrections, or a pay item that looks wrong — get in touch.