Status of foreign advanced highway technology

1998

Highway Administration. The contents of this report reflect the views of the authors who are responsible for the facts and the accuracy of the data presented herein. The contents do not necessarily reflect the official views or policies of the State of California. This report does not constitute a standard, specification, or regulation. Report for MOU 225

Policy Study, 2006

Executive Summary Despite today's horrible traffic congestion, it is tough gaining support for expanded road capacity. Amassing the funds for major urban expressway projects is slow under centrally allocated trust funding because of the political pressure to spread annual ...

Journal of Transportation Engineering, 1988

Transportation engineering is a major component of the civil engineering profession. It involves planning, design, construction, maintenance, and operation of transportation facilities. Advanced technologies in the area of information systems, automation, and telecommunications have the potential of achieving cost savings and productivity improvements as well as enabling new developments in transportation. The purpose of this paper is to review the areas where advanced technologies can significantly affect the way transportation engineering is practiced. Strategies for implementation of the necessary changes in practice are also discussed, along with the expected impact on civil engineering curriculum. The emphasis of the paper is on surface transportation. Knowledge-based expert systems (KBES) evolved from research in artificial intelligence with the overall objective of producing intelligent behavior with computers . Numerous artificial intelligence research areas exist, including theorem proving, automatic programming, vision, learning, natural language processing, and others. KBES differ from these other areas by the restriction to a limited problem solving domain such as diagnosis of malfunctions in particular equipment types. These systems are finding a wide range of suitable application areas. Several reviews of transportation (Ritchie 1986; Yeh 1986) and civil engineering Sriram 1986) applications exist. Applications have included a variety of areas such as design ), diagnosis (Ritchie et al. 1986), vehicle control (Weisbin 1986) and operations control . As computer hardware and software develops and as more experience is accumulated, KBES will become a common alternative to conventional programming. The integration of expert systems and conventional programming approaches is likely to be particularly rewarding in this regard ).

2001

The FHW A's international programs focus on meeting the growing demands of its partners at the Federal, State, and local levels for access to information on state-ofthe-art technology and the best practices used worldwide. While the FHW A is considered a world leader in highway transportation, the domestic highway community is very interested in the advanced technologies being developed by other countries, as well as innovative organizational and financing techniques used by the FHW A's international counterparts. INTERNATIONAL TECHNOLOGY SCANNING PROGRAM The International Technology Scanning Program accesses and evaluates foreign technologies and innovations that could significantly benefit U.S. highway transportation systems. Access to foreign innovations is strengthened by U.S. participation in the technical committees of international highway organizations and through bilateral technical exchange agreements with selected nations. The program has undertaken cooperatives with the American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials and its Select Committee on International Activities, and the Transportation Research Board's National Highway Research Cooperative Program (Panel 20-36), the private sector, and academia. Priority topic areas are jointly determined by the FHWA and its partners. Teams of specialists in the specific areas of expertise being investigated are formed and sent to countries where significant a dvances and innovations have been made in technology, management practices, organizational structure, program delivery, and financing. Teams usually include Federal and State highway officials, private sector and industry association representatives, as well as members of the academic community. The FHW A has organized more than 40 of these r eviews and disseminated results nationwide. Topics have encompassed pavements, bridge construction and maintenance, contracting, intermodal transport, organizational management, winter road maintenance, safety, intelligent transportation systems, planning, and policy. Findings are recommended for follow-up with further r esearch and pilot or demonstration projects to verify adaptability to the United States. Information about the scan findings and results of pilot programs are then disseminated nationally to State and local highway transportation officials and the private sector for implementation. This program has resulted in significant improvements and savings in road program technologies and practices throughout the United States, particularly in the areas of structures, pavements, safety, and winter road maintenance. Joint research and technology-sharing projects have also been launched with international counterparts, further conserving resources and advancing the state of the art.

2014

Policymakers could implement available, well-tested technologies to improve the efficiency of highway pricing, investment, and operations, which would improve travel speeds, reliability, and safety and reduce highway expenditures. Unfortunately, political and bureaucratic impediments to implement such technology exist and are unlikely to be overcome in the near future. However, technological innovations underway in the private sector, especially the driverless car, are likely to eventually leapfrog the technology that the public highway authorities could and should implement and will enable road users to obtain most of the potential benefits from technological advances in highway travel.

2001

Transportation is rapidly being changed by new technologies, such as Intelligent Transportation Systems (including smart cards, on-board diagnostics and information systems, and smarter highways, transit, automobiles, logistics systems, and other information systems). The range of options and their impacts will continue to expand as new technologies are introduced over the next two decades, and may alter transportation systems in many ways. For example, electric, hydrogen, or hybrid electric-petroleum vehicles may be introduced that would substantially alter emissions and fuel characteristics of the fleet, and potentially pose challenges in terms of system operations and finance. Smart card technologies could greatly improve the feasibility and convenience of a variety of pricing options for road use, parking, and transit fares. Monitoring and information systems could enable travelers to time trips and select routes to avoid congestion, reducing it in the process. Advanced traffic management systems could increase road capacity significantly while improving safety and respecting other objectives such as pedestrian comfort. Over the longer run, automation could make order of magnitude improvements in safety, capacity, and convenience.

Citeseer

2022

communicating with clients, colleagues and non-technical professionals on a daily basis.  Flexibility/adaptability: I have the ability to work individually without direct supervision and also as a dedicated member of a technical team whenever required.

Transportation Research Record, 2011

mine whether the project goals and objectives have been achieved and to provide insight into process improvements. The evaluation of a project can be conducted pre-and postdeployment and can be both formative and summative. A formative approach to evaluation is conducted during project development and throughout the project's life cycle. The intention of this type of evaluation is to offer feedback while the project is developing to assist in shaping the development and refining the project overall. A summative evaluation is done after the project is completed and is used to assess how the project met the intended goals. This type of evaluation is also referred to as an impact or postevaluation (2). The evaluation methodology in this research is based on a summative approach. ITS impact assessments are summative and are conducted postdeployment. The analysis is conducted with a set of performance criteria and measures of effectiveness directly related to project goals and objectives. These evaluations require data predeployment to quantify the outcomes. Common performance measurements used for evaluation are safety, travel time, throughput, customer satisfaction, air quality and emissions, and fuel consumption (1). Criteria are established for these measures and can include both quantitative and qualitative data. Measures may include an evaluation of crash statistics, travel time, and survey of users for customer satisfaction. ITS technologies are being increasingly used to provide solutions to transportation problems; however, the need for additional evaluation and documentation still exists. The financial resources required to obtain necessary data pre-and postdeployment often inhibit the evaluation capabilities. By creating an active evaluation plan, the project team can use existing resources and cooperation among stakeholders to assist with predeployment data requirements. Documented benefits from previously deployed projects exist but are limited in number (3). As more evaluations are conducted and documented, increased viability and awareness of ITS technologies will become more recognized by the transportation community as potential solutions in a constrained environment. RESEARCH PROBLEM Large-scale ITS deployments often require multiple technologies with multiple goals and objectives. Evaluation is necessary to increase the utilization of ITS in transportation planning, which requires additional documentation of ITS applications, deployments, and benefits.

Transportation Research Part A: General, 1984

Ababmct-Strategies used to deploy technological innovations are central determinants of the degree to which those innovations teak thcii potential effect on social and economic ptoductivity. The U.S. Interstate highway system was a deployment machanism for the design innovations of high-speed geometric design and tbe control of highway access. Thii stmtegy was defmed by rigid uniform minimum standards of facility design, severely constrained ahematives for contiguring tha network of facilities, and an inflexible and, in some cases, inappropriate institutional stmctum for cotWnt&tg facilities. This strategy compromised the maWtion of productivity improvemants available through the deployment of these innovations. This paper explores the origins of this deployment strategy and generahi to a discussion of deployment stmtegies for large engineered systems. It shows that each of the Interstate program's provisions derived from traditions of the agency charged with implementing it and from political expedients embraced to enact the program. Conventional wisdom within the transportation community holds that the U.S. highway system has reached its maturity. Highway advocates have receded from their traditional emphasis on new construction to an emphasis on repair, maintenance and management of existing facilities. Legislation has followed suit enabling (in 1973) and now requiring the expenditure of federal highway grants on maintenance and repair. This too is a reversal. From its outset in 1916, the federal highway program had explicitly left responsibility for maintenance to the states. The Federal Highway Administration, the agency charged with administering the U.S. highway program, has embraced the maturity paradigm as wellenforcing Congress' desire to use highway grants for maintenance and, more importantly, turning away from its traditional emphasis on highway planning. Little of the revenue gained from the recent increase in highway excise taxes will go to highway system planning. In short, the maturity paradigm infects the transportation community across a wide range of institutions. Happily, there is a dissenting view. The dissent also holds that there is maturity in the automobilehighway system. Yet the dissent sees maturity residing in the decrepit institutions and programs that govern the system and the decrepit facilities that they govern. The technology of the automobile-highway system-this the dissent sees as vital and ripe for deployment on a broader scale. The nation creeps to Ylhe research reported herein draws from the author's dissertation, for which he received iinancial suuuort from the Institute of Transportation Studies at the U&ersity of California, Berkeley. He is. of course, fully responsible for the contents.