Federal Highway Administration News: 1985

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) provides stewardship over the construction, maintenance and preservation of the Nation's highways, bridges and tunnels. News releases cover current events, research, highway safety, construction, mobility, and preservation efforts.

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) provides stewardship over the construction, maintenance and preservation of the Nation's highways, bridges and tunnels. News releases cover current events, research, highway safety, construction, mobility, and preservation efforts.

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) provides stewardship over the construction, maintenance and preservation of the Nation's highways, bridges and tunnels. News releases cover current events, research, highway safety, construction, mobility, and preservation efforts.

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) provides stewardship over the construction, maintenance and preservation of the Nation's highways, bridges and tunnels. News releases cover current events, research, highway safety, construction, mobility, and preservation efforts.

During the early 1980's, the Transportation Research Board (TRB) of the National Research Coimcil, under the sponsorship ofthe Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and with the cooperation ofthe American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) undertook a thorough study of the deterioration of the nation's highway and bridge infrastructure system. The study recommended that a Strategic Highway Research Program (SHRP) be initiated to focus research and development activities that would make major contributions to improving highway transportation. The study report published as TRB Special Report 202 during 1984, emphasized six research areas, with the Long Term Pavement Perfonnance (LTPP) program as one ofthe key research areas. During 1985 and 1986, the detailed research programs were developed for SRRP by independent contractors. The detailed programs were published in May 1986 as a TRB Report entitled, "Strategic Highway Research Program - ResearchPlans." The Long Term Pavement Performance was envisioned as a comprehensive program to satisfy "the total range of pavement information needs." It draws on "technical knowledge ofpavements presently available and seeks to develop models that will better explain how pavements perform. It also seeks to gain knowledge of the specific effects on pavement performance of various design features, traffic and environment, use of various materials, construction quality, and maintenance practices." As sufficient data becomes available with time, analysis will be conducted by various agencies to provide better performance prediction models for use in design and pavement management, to provide much better understanding of the effects of many variables on pavement performance, and to provide new techniques for pavement design and construction. This paper focuses on one phase of the program -pavement instrumentation. Prior to limiting the focus, a brief overview ofthe overall LTPP program is presented

What gets measured, gets improved. This applies to safety in the construction industry, where the primary measure of safety performance of construction workers is the OSHA recordable incidence rate. While this reactive metric is important to understand the frequency of injuries, it does not assist in managing the safety, health, and overall well-being of construction workers. Therefore, researchers encourage using metrics that assist in indicating a higher likelihood of an injury occurring since such metrics would be more beneficial to improving safety and health. While proactive safety performance indicators have been extensively discussed in the literature of construction research, minimal attention has been paid to using these metrics in the highway construction and maintenance sector. This study addressed this gap by developing a holistic action-ready mechanism to assess safety performance of highway maintenance personnel in Kentucky. Using the analytic hierarchy process analysis (AHP), 5 metrics and 65 leading indicators were selected and weighed to proactively reflect the safety performance of the targeted workforce. The final product of the study is a scorecard used to assess safety performance of Kentucky highway maintenance crews on a district level, an area level, and a program level. This study provides a useful proactive tool that can be used by States DOTs to assess safety performance of their maintenance crews. In addition, the study contributes to the body of knowledge by discussing the use of proactive performance metrics in the highway construction and maintenance sector.

The complex problem of metrication of highway design, construction and maintenance has been the subject of a number of studies and pilot projects carried out by the Federal Highway Administration (F.H.W.A.) of the United States and the Roads and Transportation Association of Canada. Through a research grant, the FHWA of the U.S.A. assigned the Ohio Department of Transportation, the Illinois Department of Transportation and the Oregon Highway Division to design, construct, and maintain these metric projects. The author has reviewed the experience and conclusions of these studies and the problems encountered in the pilot projects relative to the design, survey, contracting, construction, signing, and public reactions to the metrication process. In the conclusions to this review, the author questions some of the recommendations of these studies, specifically in the area of curvature and station definition, notation convention, and the concept of dual signing. In these and other areas recommended guidelines for highway metrication are proposed. Finally, the author presents a set of equations and computer generated tables for highway design and layout in metric incorporating the flexibility of 10, 20, 40, and 100 metre station and curvature definition.

In order to systematically analyze the trends in crash occurrence, Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) has developed over the years a state-wide crash database and a GIS-based Data Almanac to search through the crash database as well as other databases including annual average daily traffic (AADT). The Data Almanac is a powerful search engine for extracting necessary crash data. Using the crash data provides one way to describe what has happened to the sections of highways that the analysts are evaluating. However, evaluating what might happen when improvements are made requires going one step further. The Interactive Highway Safety Design Model (IHSDM) developed by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), may be used to help the engineers conduct crash prediction and design consistency evaluation and intersection safety review as part of highway safety audits. This software provides an opportunity to design, operation, and safety audits, This software provides an opportunity to design, operation, and safety engineers for evaluating sections of two-lane highways from various aspects and identifying most cost effective improvement alternatives to such audited sections.

Intelligent Vehicle-Highway Systems (IVHS) is a major U.S. Department of Transportation initiative to improve the safety and efficiency of our nation's highways. IVHS includes five related components: Advanced Traffic Management Systems (ATMS); Advanced Traveler Information Systems (ATIS); Commercial Vehicle Operations (CVO); Advanced Vehicle Control Systems (AVCS); and, Advanced Public Transportation Systems (APTS). Although the Federal Highway Administration has initially chosen to address each of these components separately, a number of issues are shared by all components. One critical common element deals with the capabilities of the humans in the system. Appropriate guidelines that consider the needs and capabilities of operators, maintainers, and users will be critical for efficient functioning of each system. Efforts are underway to define and resolve critical human factors issues related to IVHS components. This symposium addresses four of the five more highway related IVHS components. For each of these components, presenters will define the key engineering characteristics, hypothetical scenarios that focus on human-system interfaces, and examples of human factors issues that must be considered in the design of IVHS systems.

A National highway and urban runoff water-quality metadatabase was developed by the U.S. Geological Survey in cooperation with the Federal Highway Administration as part of the National Highway Runoff Water-Quality Data and Methodology Synthesis (NDAMS). The database was designed to catalog available literature and to document results of the synthesis in a format that would facilitate current and future research on highway and urban runoff. This report documents the design and implementation of the NDAMS relational database, which was designed to provide a catalog of available information and the results of an assessment of the available data. All the citations and the metadata collected during the review process are presented in a stratified metadatabase that contains citations for relevant publications, abstracts (or previa), and report-review metadata for a sample of selected reports that document results of runoff quality investigations. The database is referred to as a metadatabase because it contains information about available data sets rather than a record of the original data. The database contains the metadata needed to evaluate and characterize how valid, current, complete, comparable, and technically defensible published and available information may be when evaluated for application to the different data-quality objectives as defined by decision makers. This database is a relational database, in that all information is ultimately linked to a given citation in the catalog of available reports. The main database file contains 86 tables consisting of 29 data tables, 11 association tables, and 46 domain tables. The data tables all link to a particular citation, and each data table is focused on one aspect of the information collected in the literature search and the evaluation of available information. This database is implemented in the Microsoft (MS) Access database software because it is widely used within and outside of government and so, is familiar to many existing and potential customers. The stratified metadatabase design for the NDAMS program is implemented in the MS Access file DBDESIGN.mdb and documented using the NDAMS_DD.mdb file recorded on the CD-ROM. The data dictionary file includes complete documentation of the table names, table descriptions, and information about each of the 419 fields in the database.

This report documents the research performed under NCHRP Project 1-43. It describes the work activities undertaken in the study and presents the results of those activities toward the development of the Guide for Pavement Friction. The information provided in this report serves as the basis for many of the guidelines and recommendations contained in the Guide. The information will be of interest to highway materials, construction, pavement management, safety, design, and research engineers, as well as others concerned with the friction and related surface characteristics of highway pavements. Using information collected through detailed literature reviews and surveys/interviews with state highway agencies, this report discusses a variety of aspects regarding pavement friction. It describes and illustrates the importance of friction in highway safety, as well as the principles of friction, as defined by micro-texture and macro-texture. It identifies the factors affecting friction and examines the ways that friction can be measured (equipment and procedures) and expressed (reporting indices). Most importantly, it presents valuable information on (a) the management of friction on existing highway pavements and (b) the design of new highway surfaces with adequate friction. This information focuses on techniques for monitoring friction and crashes and determining the need for remedial action, as well as identifying combinations of aggregate (micro-texture) and mix types/surface texturing methods (macro-texture) that satisfy friction design requirements. The report includes various conclusions and recommendations based on the results of the study, and it features five appendixes containing supplemental information on friction.

In recent years, with the extending highway construction scale in mountain areas, there is lack of traffic safety facilities in some mountain areas. The problems of unreasonable and irregular traffic guarantee engineering construction stand out. Especially in rural highway in mountain areas with complex topography, the traffic accident rates are increasing, causing lots of dead and economic losses. Studying deeply on rural highway traffic safety problems in mountain areas and improving rural highway traffic safety level are the problems that we need to solve urgently. This essay analyzes the law of rural highway traffic accidents in mountain areas and makes a conclusion that the existing problems in rural highway safety managements in mountain areas at present. Based on this, this essay analyzes systematically the influent factors of rural highway traffic safety and a conclusion can be drew that the frequent rural highway traffic accidents in mountain areas not only are caused by bad line type for roads and no security arrangements are set. At last, based on macro-management level, it proposes a series of positive highway safety management countermeasures including strengthening traffic safety education, establishing traffic safety management system, improving passenger transport policy and management system, formulating dangerous sections inspection mechanisms.

This report is designed to document the analysis process and estimation models currently used by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) to estimate the off-highway gasoline consumption and public sector fuel consumption. An overview of the entire FHWA attribution process is provided along with specifics related to the latest update (2008) on the Off-Highway Gasoline Use Model and the Public Use of Gasoline Model. The Off-Highway Gasoline Use Model is made up of five individual modules, one for each of the off-highway categories: agricultural, industrial and commercial, construction, aviation, and marine. This 2008 update of the off-highway models was the second major update (the first model update was conducted during 2002-2003) after they were originally developed in mid-1990. The agricultural model methodology, specifically, underwent a significant revision because of changes in data availability since 2003. Some revision to the model was necessary due to removal of certain data elements used in the original estimation method. The revised agricultural model also made use of some newly available information, published by the data source agency in recent years. The other model methodologies were not drastically changed, though many data elements were updated to improve the accuracy of these models. Note that components in the Public Use of Gasoline Model were not updated in 2008. A major challenge in updating estimation methods applied by the public-use model is that they would have to rely on significant new data collection efforts. In addition, due to resource limitation, several components of the models (both off-highway and public-us models) that utilized regression modeling approaches were not recalibrated under the 2008 study. An investigation of the Environmental Protection Agency's NONROAD2005 model was also carried out under the 2008 model update. Results generated from the NONROAD2005 model were analyzed, examined, and compared, to the extent that is possible on the overall totals, to the current FHWA estimates. Because NONROAD2005 model was designed for emission estimation purposes (i.e., not for measuring fuel consumption), it covers different equipment populations from those the FHWA models were based on. Thus, a direct comparison generally was not possible in most sectors. As a result, NONROAD2005 data were not used in the 2008 update of the FHWA off-highway models. The quality of fuel use estimates directly affect the data quality in many tables published in the Highway Statistics. Although updates have been made to the Off-Highway Gasoline Use Model and the Public Use Gasoline Model, some challenges remain due to aging model equations and discontinuation of data sources.

On January 13, 1989, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) published its Pavement Policy. One of the most important parts of that policy is a mandate that every State develop and implement a Pavement Management System (PMS) within 4 years after that publishing date. All States have been attempting to meet that deadline and FHWA has been monitoring their progress. To provide guidance on the Policy, FHWA followed with an FHPM (6-2-4-1) in which the major elements that need to be included for a system to be judged acceptable were explained. The figures chosen depict the progress being made by number of States in each of the major elements of a PMS. The comments on each give one a feel for what FHWA thinks is needed in a PMS to meet minimum criteria for acceptability.

This paper explores the economic effects of highway construction specifically as a result of economic development funds that have been available to the states for a decade. The introduction includes a research of the legislative history of the program. It also includes summary values as to the dollars that have been appropriated by the Congress and utilized by the states. The summary comments are supported by comprehensive materials included in the Appendix to the paper. The introduction includes an analysis as to the Congressional intent for the program. The paper is based upon the results of a questionnaire developed by the writer and directed to the states who have participated in the program and document the type of projects completed by the states as well as the philosophical base from which the projects were selected. It explores before and after study methodologies by the states, the Federal Highway Administration, and/or the Government Accounting Office on behalf of the Congress to determine the e...