Two fully loaded (80,000 pounds nominal weight) tractor semi-trailer trucks were impacted into an instrumented wall at 55 miles per hour and an oblique angle of 15 degrees to the wall. This effort was conducted under two separate contracts, one under FHWA and the other NHTSA. The objective of the FHWA contract was to determine lateral impact forces in heavy vehicle collisions with an instrument...

Winter road maintenance practitioners have expressed a strong interest in obtaining weather and road condition forecasts and treatment recommendations specific to winter road maintenance routes. These user needs led the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Office of Transportation Operations Road Weather Management Program to support the development of a prototype winter road Maintenance Decis...

There are over 60,000 miles (100,000 km) of coastal highways in the United States (US) that occasionally exposed to waves and water levels. Wise stewardship calls for integration engineering principles practices planning design these roads bridges make them more resilient. A new, 3rd, edition primary guidance document Hydraulic Engineering Circular No. 25 (HEC-25), entitled “Highways Coastal En...

Wide-area drainage structure (DS) mapping is of great concern, as many DSs are reaching the end their design life and information on location usually absent. Recently, airborne laser scanning (ALS) has been proven useful for DS through manual methods using ALS-derived digital elevation models (DEMs) hillshade images. However, slow labor-intensive. To overcome these limitations, this paper propo...

Kim, Daehyeon, Shin, Youngjin, and Siddiki, Nayyar. “Geotechnical Design Based on CPT and PMT” Final Report FHWA/IN/JTRP-2009/XX, SPR 3106, Joint Transportation Research Program, Purdue University, September 2008

On-road transportation is responsible for 28% of all U.S. fossil-fuel CO2 emissions. Mapping vehicle emissions at regional scales is challenging due to data limitations. Existing emission inventories use spatial proxies such as population and road density to downscale national or state-level data. Such procedures introduce errors where the proxy variables and actual emissions are weakly correla...

This reference manual includes sections on (1) concepts of functional highway classification and functional system characteristics and (2) suggested procedures for functional highway classification in rural, small urban and urbanized areas. The material herein is adapted from two previous FHWA manuals concerned with functional highway classification. The relationship of this manual to these pre...

This paper describes the work and results of the second phase of research sponsored by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) initiated to study the relationship between traffic activity and ambient PM2.5 concentrations. The study, entitled “Estimating the Transportation Contribution to Particulate Matter Pollution”, had the objective of performing a correlation analyses on particulate matte...

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Office of Safety has identified intersections as one of its safety focus areas. As part of the FHWA efforts to reduce intersection crashes and the related injuries and fatalities, two concepts have been identified: (1) rumble strips on outside shoulders and in a painted yellow median island on major road approaches and (2) channelizing separator islands...

Nighttime highway sign legibility distance was evaluated as drivers maintained speeds of 5 versus 60 MPH. Effective legibility distance fell by approximately 30% when driving at high speed (114.9 versus 81.2 m at 5 and 60 MPH, respectively; F(1,9) = 48.6, p < 0.001). This finding suggests that past research, usually conducted under static viewing conditions (i.e., less than 5 MPH), probably ove...