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Transportation planners always need to be aware of potential impacts from their projects to federally listed endangered species and designated critical habitats. If a project may impact these wildlife populations or habitats, Section 7 of the Endangered Species Act requires planners to create a biological assessment and complete a consultation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS).
FHWA's Research Associateship Program helps participants launch their careers—sometimes with FHWA itself.
Postdoctoral candidates who apply for positions as research associates with the Federal Highway Administration do so to continue their research, make connections in their fields, and launch their careers. For some, career success is found right at the facility where they started as associates.
Despite the shift in how to meet the needs of today's workforce, the National Highway Institute (NHI) prides itself on its commitment to provide quality training to engineers. To continue to do so, NHI now offers some of its structures courses in an online, instructor-led format.
Below are brief descriptions of communications products recently developed by the Federal Highway Administration's Office of Research, Development, and Technology. All of the reports are or will soon be available from the National Technical Information Service (NTIS). In some cases, limited copies of the communications products are available from FHWA's Research and Technology (R&T) Product Distribution Center (PDC).
Compiled by Lisa A. Shuler of FHWA's Office of Corporate Research, Technology, and Innovation Management
Working Together to Improve Pedestrian Safety
In 2019, traffic deaths decreased across the United States, with a fatality rate of 1.10 per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, the lowest since 2014. This is positive news, but even more encouraging is the 2.7-percent decrease in the number of pedestrian fatalities.
Sometimes the inspiration to try something innovative can come from your neighbor's proverbial backyard. Creating a neighborhood for the transportation community to share their successes was the goal of the National State Transportation Innovation Council Network Showcase (STIC Showcase), conducted as part of the Virtual Summit that launched Every Day Counts round six (EDC-6; for more information, see the Innovation Corner in the Winter 2021 issue of Public Roads).
FHWA's CARMASM Program is testing how cooperative driving automation can manage work zone congestion and enhance safety.
Download Public Roads Spring-2021.pdf (12.8MB)
Highway traffic creates noise—and sometimes the negative impacts of noise in an area need to be mitigated or minimized. To do so, a project team must first conduct a highway traffic noise analysis to determine whether noise impacts exist and to consider and design potential mitigation measures—noise abatement—to reduce those impacts. Designing noise abatement requires understanding basic acoustic principles, regulatory requirements, public expectations, and some engineering considerations.
