Highway RD&T Program Organization and Focus
The first section of this chapter provides a brief overview of the federal and state RD&T programs and their funding levels and describes how the various programs interconnect and reinforce one another. The second summarizes the many barriers to innovation in public infrastructure agencies and thus explains why RD&T programs to overcome these barriers are so important for innovation in the highway sector.
Responsibilities for the road network in the United States are highly decentralized. The nation’s nearly 4 million miles of roads are the responsibilities of states and tens of thousands of other jurisdictions, including metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), cities, counties, and towns (FHWA n.d., Table HM-60). The 47,000 miles of Interstate highways, of greatest federal interest, make up about 2.5 percent of the total road network and account for about a quarter of total annual motor vehicle miles traveled (FHWA n.d., Table VM-1); they are owned, maintained, and operated by the 50 states. The other roughly 730,000 miles of intercity highways are the responsibilities of states, except within metropolitan areas, where MPOs influence funding decisions. Counties, towns, and other jurisdictions are responsible for the remaining 3.2 million miles of arterial and local roads; these jurisdictions typically depend on their state DOTs for technical assistance.
Complex Set of Research Programs
Jurisdictions face differing challenges in building, maintaining, and operating roads because of the wide variations in climate, soil conditions, topography, sources of pavement aggregates and recycled materials, traffic, and levels of development. Thus, the Bureau of Public Roads, the forerunner of today’s FHWA, in establishing federal research in support of road development in 1936, decided that a coordinated program of federal research supplementing state research addressing unique state issues made better sense than a centralized federal research program for highways. The same basic program structure exists today, but it has been enhanced and amplified as the road network has become more pervasive and integrated with the U.S. economy and society. A complex array of highway research programs has developed in response to the needs of the various agencies and jurisdictions responsible for different aspects of the nation’s road network.
RD&T Funding
Most highway research in the public sector is driven by federal surface transportation legislation, which authorizes a small array of research programs related to highway transportation (Table 3-1). In addition to funding FHWA research and development (R&D), the current authorizing legislation funds research at the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) on motor carrier safety and regulation; the Federal Transit Administration (FTA), mentioned here because transit buses rely on roads; the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) on motor vehicle and driver safety; and the Office of the Secretary of Transportation—Research. The latter administers the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) program of multimodal surface transportation R&D and the University Transportation Centers (UTC) program, which provides competitively awarded grants to universities based on proposals for conducting intermodal research, educating transportation professionals, and training future researchers.
TABLE 3-1 Federal Funding for Highway-Related Research (FY 2013 enacted)
Federal Highway Administration |
191.4 |
Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration |
8.5 |
Federal Transit Administration |
41.6 |
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration |
62.8 |
Office of the Secretary of Transportation—Research |
2.6 |
Intelligent Transportation Systems |
100.0 |
University Transportation Centers |
72.5 |
State Planning and Research |
184.7 |
TOTAL |
664.1 |
NOTE: Figures are dollar amounts in millions enacted for FY 2013.
SOURCE: FHWA and U.S. Department of Transportation RD&T Strategic Plan, Table 1.
Funds allocated to federal transportation administrations (FHWA, NHTSA, FMCSA, FTA) address the specific (nonoverlapping) missions of these agencies. In addition, federal authorizing legislation requires states to set aside 2 percent of federal aid for capital improvements for planning and research, of which one-quarter must be spent on research. As described below, State Planning and Research (SP&R) provides the core funds that states rely on for their individual and collective research activities.
Highway RD&T
The focus of this report is on highway RD&T for construction, operation, safety, planning, environmental mitigation, and policy—activities that are primarily the responsibility of FHWA, the states, MPOs, and many other jurisdictions. Both FHWA and states fund applied highway-specific RD&T, and much federal ITS and UTC research is also specific to highways. FHWA’s RD&T activities focus on its core mission responsibilities: infrastructure, safety, operations, planning and environment, and
TABLE 3-2 Federal and State Highway-Specific RD&T
FHWA Highway R&D |
115.0 |
Exploratory Advanced Research |
8.0 |
FHWA Highway R&D | |
Infrastructure |
36.0 |
Safety |
10.0 |
Operations |
11.0 |
Planning and Environment |
13.5 |
Policy |
6.0 |
Innovative Program Delivery |
2.0 |
Corporate |
5.6 |
Strategic Initiatives (cross-cutting) |
20.0 |
Small Business Innovation Research |
2.9 |
Technology and Innovation Deployment Program |
62.5 |
Training and Education |
24.0 |
State Planning and Researcha |
184.7 |
TOTAL |
386.2 |
NOTE: Figures are dollar amounts in millions for FY 2013.
a In 2011, states were estimated to have spent about $80 million (additional) state funds on highway R&D.
SOURCE: FHWA.
policy (Table 3-2, above). FHWA also funds training programs and devotes roughly $60 million annually to assist in implementing innovations that flow from FHWA, state, and other highway R&D programs.
The ITS R&D program is primarily focused on the connected vehicle initiative, a collaboration among the federal government, automobile original equipment manufacturers, and public-sector infrastructure owners. ITS is funding R&D aimed at allowing communication of safety-related information between vehicles (vehicle to vehicle or V2V) and among vehicles and traffic signals and other infrastructure (vehicle to infrastructure or
V2I). The ITS program exemplifies the type of long-range, high-risk research that the federal government is uniquely suited for because it requires persistence over many years, collaboration between government and industry at the national level, and national standardization of communication technologies and applications.
The UTC program funds both inter- and cross-modal R&D and provides education and training for the development of future transportation professionals and researchers. Much of the research covers more than one mode or addresses cross-modal issues. However, the focus of a substantial share of the research projects is on highway issues because most UTCs are required to match federal funding dollar for dollar and many UTCs receive their match from their state DOT. The Research and Technology Coordinating Committee’s (RTCC’s) most recent major report found that the majority of UTC research projects at the time were addressing highway research topics (TRB 2008).
States use federal SP&R funds primarily for highly applied R&D addressing unique, state-specific issues and interests. In addition to the $184.7 million in federal funds authorized for this purpose in FY 2013, the states spend some of their own funds on highway RD&T. Most states simply meet the federal 80–20 matching requirement, but others exceed it. The most recent estimate, based on a biennial National Science Foundation survey of state R&D spending, indicates an additional allocation of about $80 million of state funds to highway research in FY 2011.1 Besides supporting their individual research initiatives, states combine their efforts by pooling their funds on topics of common interest. The largest and longest-standing example is the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) (a $39 million program in FY 2013), but many other less formal pooled-fund projects are under way at any given time, often including FHWA as a funding partner with a subset of states. NCHRP’s work has often been described as conduct of
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1http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf14311/pdf/tab13.pdf. Accessed Feb. 12, 2015.
the analysis and synthesis of research that is the final step before translation of the results into specifications and standards for highway construction and operation. NCHRP also produces guidelines, software and analytical tools, and manuals for all aspects of highway transportation. Finally, as noted, states also often provide matching funds for universities participating in the UTC program.
The $382 million invested annually in highway-specific RD&T may appear to be a large amount, but in the context of the $130 billion required to maintain the nation’s highways each year, the annual RD&T budget is modest. It represents 0.3 percent of the annual cost of maintaining the system. In the context of the asset value of the nation’s highways, the annual federal highway RD&T budget is almost vanishingly small—only 0.014 percent.
One other major highway research program deserves mention. Although the research has been completed at the time of this writing, SHRP 2 has produced dozens of innovations that are lined up to be deployed to the states. Previous surface transportation legislation [the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU)] authorized SHRP 2, which invested $223 million over the past 9 years in research that developed innovations in four areas:
- Providing highway capacity more expeditiously while protecting the environment,
- Renewing aging infrastructure more quickly,
- Improving system performance and reliability, and
- Improving safety.
The innovations flowing from SHRP 2 are being implemented by early adopters and will be promoted more intensively and broadly to the states through FHWA’s Technology and Innovation Deployment Program.
At first sight, the array of highway-related and highway-specific research programs summarized above may appear to be
overly complex and potentially duplicative. However, in practice, the programs address specific, distinct missions, and the highway-specific research programs are coordinated and organized to avoid duplication. FHWA’s R&D programs focus on federal initiatives designed to benefit the nation as a whole. They include high-risk advanced exploratory research unlikely to be undertaken by nonfederal organizations and projects of a scale, complexity, and duration that exceed what any but the largest states could manage. FHWA’s technology transfer and training programs are designed to foster deployment of tested and proven technologies and processes to states, MPOs, cities, and counties that own and operate roads. The state programs focus on state-specific topics, as well as topics of collective interest to all states or groups of states. The states’ largest pooled-fund project, NCHRP, is closely coordinated with FHWA’s program. The UTC R&D program is often tied to state DOT interests because of the DOT provision of state matching funds, and the students graduating from UTC programs often find employment in transportation agencies. To avoid duplication across all these programs, each program submits all of its research projects into a national database, the Research-in-Progress database maintained by the Transportation Research Board, and research program managers are required by federal regulation to consult this database before they initiate new projects.
Risk aversion in the public sector is well known—institutions and public officials are understandably leery of taking risks since, in contrast to the private sector, rewards are few but failure can have severe consequences for public support of agencies and for individual careers. Highways are capital-intensive and long-lived, which makes officials conservative with regard to design, materials, and construction. In addition, with the exception of some toll roads, highways are funded with public tax dollars and contracts are awarded through competitive bidding processes.
Highway agencies have long labored to ensure that contracts are awarded in a fair and transparent process that avoids opportunities for corruption. In such circumstances, officials tend to follow familiar procedures and avoid the unknown.
Several reports over the years have identified and discussed barriers to innovation in the highway sector (TRB 1996; TRB 1999; TRB 2001). The following are some of the main issues identified in these reports:
- Normal human resistance to change;
- Lack of incentives, strong disincentives, and risk aversion in the public sector;
- Slow dispersion of innovations across a fragmented sector with 50 states, 342 MPOs, and tens of thousands of county and municipal public works departments with responsibilities for roads;
- Lowest-bid contractor selection for transparency in contract award that does not necessarily represent best value for the long term;
- Slow processes of field testing, standards development, and specifications development; and
- Need for manuals, guidance, and extensive training to prepare workforces for new approaches.
These barriers are discussed in the reports referenced above, and the fuller treatment in previous reports need not be repeated here. The main point to take from this list is that several interrelated barriers make adoption of innovation in the highway sector a substantial, but not insurmountable, challenge. Public processes are slow moving, and that is understandable because they involve public funds. Even when innovations have been proved through field tests and adoption by one or more jurisdictions, dispersion can occur slowly because of the decentralized ownership of roads, lack of awareness by both public officials and private contractors, and the need to train the transportation workforce in new concepts and approaches.
Nevertheless, innovations are occurring in the highway sector and not just in the performance of materials. They are occurring in procurement processes and construction techniques that speed project delivery. As described in Chapter 2, for example, the DB approach allows contractors to propose innovations during the design phase that specification-based bidding makes difficult. Highway agencies have learned how to carry out DB and other new contracting methods through bidding processes that give contractors more freedom to innovate while maintaining transparency in bid awards (Molenaar and Tran 2015). Innovations that give contractors more opportunities to transform their processes have themselves accelerated adoption of innovations that speed construction. This is only the beginning of what will be needed in the face of a vast aging infrastructure and great shortfalls in funding for system maintenance at every level of government.
The typical role of federal research agencies is to fund basic or precompetitive research and then assume that the private sector, motivated by profit interest, will pick up these ideas and develop them into marketable products. This model is inadequate for the highway sector because the sector is largely owned and operated by public agencies. Supporting the development of good ideas is not enough to overcome the barriers to innovation. Also required are efforts to obtain buy-in from states and other infrastructure owners, including field trials and demonstration projects to prove that new concepts work, extensive technical assistance to all levels of government, development of curricula and training programs, and preparation and dissemination of manuals and guidebooks. Because of its scale and national scope, FHWA is uniquely qualified to carry out these tasks, as it has done throughout its history.
Many research programs address highway performance and safety in some fashion; these programs relate to the missions
of the specific agencies (highway construction, maintenance, operation, and safety; motor carrier safety; transit operations; and motor vehicle safety). Highway-specific RD&T is primarily conducted by FHWA and the state DOT research programs, with supporting initiatives in the ITS and UTC programs. The decentralized nature of the programs follows the decentralized nature of responsibilities for roads. Arguably, research programs that are managed by the owners of infrastructure, primarily states for interstate and intercity highways, are more likely to be responsive to their immediate needs. The highly applied, problem-solving nature of individual state DOT research programs and NCHRP is true to this mission. Even so, the decentralized nature of the programs may seem “messy” and overly complex at first sight. FHWA plays an important leadership and coordination function across highway-specific research agencies, and policies and regulations ensure appropriate focus and avoidance of duplication.
Barriers to innovation among highway agencies are substantial, largely because of the agencies’ public role and the need for transparency in the award of highway funds derived from taxes paid by users. Innovations tend to spread slowly and to be hard won, which testifies to the importance of a strong push from FHWA and the states through effective technology transfer and deployment programs.
The modest annual federal investment in highway-specific RD&T of $382 million to address and overcome the barriers to innovation is a bargain, representing only 0.3 percent of the annual cost of maintaining the highway system.