In 2004, the Federal Highway Administration published updated rules governing work zone safety and mobility; all highway construction and maintenance projects using federal-aid highway funds are required to develop transportation management plans (TMP) focusing on safety and the reduction of traffic mobility impacts through coordination. The project TMP should consist of a collection of administrative, procedural, and operational strategies for managing and mitigating the impacts of work zones. It is important for planners, operations personnel, and incident responders to understand why the...

Currently, a well-defined and validated set of metrics to use in monitoring work zone performance do not exist. This pilot test was conducted to assist state DOTs in identifying what work zone performance measures can and should be targeted, what data they will need to collect to compute those measures, and what methods exist to obtain that data. Work zone activity and traffic data from five work zone projects were gathered and analyzed. Multiple data sources and collection methods were examined and utilized to the extent available at each project. These sources were field crew personnel...

In 2004, a team of representatives from the Federal Highway Administration, State highway agencies, industry, and academia visited Canada, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Scotland, and the United Kingdom. The purpose of this International Technology Scanning Program study was to identify practices that might be evaluated and applied in the United States to improve construction management. One significant scan finding was that the countries visited had an advanced awareness of risk assessment and allocation techniques that are just now evolving in U.S. highway agencies. This instructional...

Much of America's transportation infrastructure is reaching the end of its design life and needs to be reconstructed. At the same time, traffic levels and the resulting congestion levels continue to increase steadily. These two factors combined pose a significant challenge to State Departments of Transportation (DOTs) and the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). To address this challenge, FHWA has been working with State DOTs and industry to develop a "toolbox" of potential solutions. One tool in this toolbox is performance contracting. Performance contracting is an approach where a private...

This primer has been developed to assist agencies in establishing and monitoring a useful set of work zone safety and mobility performance measures. Work zone performance measures are metrics that help to quantify how work zones impact travelers, residents, businesses and workers. Work zone performance measures help agencies improve their understanding of how their decisions during planning, design, and construction affect work zone safety and mobility, and thus can help improve how they make decisions for future work zones. The primer describes possible work zone performance measures, and...

Highway hydraulic structures perform the vital function of conveying, diverting, or removing surface water from the highway right-of-way. They should be designed to be commensurate with risk, construction cost, importance of the road, economy of maintenance, and legal requirements. One type of drainage facility will rarely provide the most satisfactory drainage for all sections of a highway. Therefore, the designer should know and understand how different drainage facilities can be integrated to provide complete drainage control. Drainage design covers many disciplines, of which two are...

Highway hydraulic structures perform the vital function of conveying, diverting, or removing surface water from the highway right-of-way. They should be designed to be commensurate with risk, construction cost, importance of the road, economy of maintenance, and legal requirements. One type of drainage facility will rarely provide the most satisfactory drainage for all sections of a highway. Therefore, the designer should know and understand how different drainage facilities can be integrated to provide complete drainage control. Drainage design covers many disciplines, of which two are...