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Along the Road is the place to look for information about current and upcoming activities, developments, trends, and items of general interest to the highway community. This information comes from U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) sources unless otherwise indicated. Your suggestions and input are welcome. Let’s meet along the road.
FHWA Case Study Features Dockless Bike Share
The purpose of hydraulic engineering is to design a structure with the proper capacity to divert or remove water from the roadway and pass collected water under the roadway. Designing a hydraulic structure requires knowing how much water is associated with the design storm (hydrology) and calculating the velocity, depth, and type of flow (hydraulics) that must be accounted for.
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).
USDOT successfully demonstrated the ability to operate connected vehicles cross-site, over-the-air among six participating vendors from three pilot sites.
Some transportation agencies are choosing innovative solutions to better manage adverse weather conditions on their roadways--saving lives and enhancing mobility.
The lessons from Denver's collaboration with FHWA's Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center can help other communities develop a connected vehicle program.
Two years ago, a fire under the Interstate 85 (I–85) viaduct in Atlanta, GA, caused part of the bridge to collapse, severing a freeway that carries 243,000 vehicles daily. Looking back at the aftermath, one common theme emerged that greatly contributed to the successful outcome of rebuilding 700 feet (213 meters) of the bridge in less than 7 weeks: partnership.
The highway construction industry is facing a shortage of skilled workers to fill jobs that are too often left vacant. Construction firms say they can fill only 60 percent or less of the open jobs in critical occupations, including heavy equipment operators, cement masons, and iron workers, according to surveys by the Associated General Contractors of America in 2015 and 2018. The worker shortage threatens the safety and efficiency of the highway system by slowing the progress of needed highway projects and delaying benefits to highway users.
Humans have a long history of observing and measuring the earth to find distances, define borders, and create the built environment. People have used tools to accomplish this since the earliest hand-inked maps and now-forgotten measuring units (for example, cubits). Today, with emerging and advanced technological resources available, engineers can address the same needs with unprecedented speed, detail, and flexibility.