The first section of this chapter summarizes the essential role that RTCC has recommended that FHWA play in RD&T and provides examples of payoffs from FHWA efforts in RD&T. In the second, RTCC identifies two particularly important missions that FHWA will be required to fulfill in the future, in addition to its other RD&T responsibilities.
The FHWA RD&T program is one among many. Over the years, RTCC has recommended that FHWA focus its efforts in areas that correspond to its capabilities and complement the programs of the states and other federal agencies (TRB 2001):
- Investing in long-term, high-risk research;
- Filling research gaps and addressing issues with national implications; and
- Supporting technology transfer (including training and education).
The following sections briefly summarize why these areas of RD&T are uniquely suited to the federal role.
Investing in Long-Term, High-Risk Research
In all areas of science and technology, the federal government’s role is recognized as one of pursuing new knowledge through basic research programs in agencies such as the National Science
Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Energy. Because highway research, and transportation research more generally, spans many disciplines and fields, it is not surprising that there is little basic research in this area. Instead, many highway innovations depend on breakthroughs in chemistry, materials, mathematics, organizational performance, and other fields. Traffic flow theory, for example, draws on basic research in game theory and fluid flow theory, while ITS draws on research into sensors and control (TRB 2014). However, there is a role for advanced research that actively seeks out, synthesizes, and translates emerging knowledge from the basic sciences for application in highway transportation. RTCC has long recommended that FHWA invest in such research because of the federal role in investing in research that may not lead directly to new products in the short term (TRB 1994; TRB 2001). FHWA’s Exploratory Advanced Research (EAR) program was funded at $11 million annually by Congress during SAFETEA-LU and is being continued at about $8 million during MAP-21. The program is risky and long term by its nature, and it engages in areas of research that state DOTs are unlikely to pursue. Such research might appear to be natural for the UTC program. However, universities receiving matching funds from state DOTs are likely to be driven by state DOT interests in near-term, applied research with immediate application (TRB 2008). In view of the EAR program’s exploratory nature and short history, discussion of its benefits is premature. However, RTCC views it as an essential component of FHWA’s RD&T portfolio.
Among funding agencies, only FHWA has the resources and ability to conduct long-term research dedicated to highways that explores fundamental relationships. FHWA is under less pressure than are state DOT research programs to deliver products to solve immediate problems and is better able to invest for the long term in search of larger payoffs that serve national goals. The Long-Term Pavement Performance (LTPP) program, a federal–state partnership of more than 29 years,
has collected data on highway pavement performance across a wide range of topographic, climate, and traffic conditions, with subsurface conditions, materials, construction, and other characteristics taken into account (TRB 2009a). Even as late as the 1980s, pavement design was based on empirical relationships between loading and deterioration without regard for other characteristics, such as variations in climate, materials, subsurface conditions, and traffic. The first Strategic Highway Research Program (SHRP) recommended a long-term program that would conduct a large-scale experiment to collect pavement performance data to account for a wide range of possible contributors to pavement deterioration. The program began as part of the first SHRP in 1987, and Congress funded the program through FHWA’s RD&T program in subsequent authorizations. Now recognized as the world’s best collection of research-quality pavement data,1 the LTPP data have proved essential to states in recent years as they have transitioned from design based on empirical relationships to design based on scientific and engineering principles. States now rely extensively on LTPP data to calibrate pavement models to account for local conditions, which has led to more cost-effective designs.2 The benefits of the LTPP database to pavements have been so fundamental and extensive that FHWA has embarked in recent years on a similar program for bridges, the Long-Term Bridge Performance program.
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1 See Richter summary of research breakthroughs in pavement management at http://www.trb.org/AboutTRB/KeyResearchAchievements.aspx?srcaud=AboutTRB. “The program’s single most significant product to date, as well as the largest source of information for current and future research, is the LTPP database. The database contains more research-quality data than have been collected anywhere before on the rate, type, and extent of pavement deterioration due to age, traffic loads, and weather, together with information on the design features and construction methods used to construct or rehabilitate the pavements. LTPP data has contributed to more cost-effective highway pavements by providing more realistic pavement design models; improved understanding of how and why pavements perform as they do; high-quality data on which to base pavement management and rehabilitation decisions; guidance to support selection of the most cost-effective pavement design features for a given set of design constraints; and a knowledge base on which to develop educational curricula for future generations of pavement practitioners.”
2 See Feldman summary of research breakthroughs in rigid pavement design at http://www.trb.org/AboutTRB/KeyResearchAchievements.aspx?srcaud=AboutTRB.
Filling Research Gaps and Addressing Issues with National Implications
FHWA plays a unique role in highway RD&T by identifying and filling research gaps that have broad application across the country. An example is the role that FHWA played in the development of the Highway Safety Manual (HSM) and a series of technical tools, collectively referred to as “SafetyAnalyst,” that assist states in identifying and prioritizing roadway safety improvements through use of the latest findings from highway safety research. In 1999, highway safety professionals conceived the idea of developing a manual, analogous to the Highway Capacity Manual, that would bring together the latest scientific knowledge about road design elements (e.g., number of lanes, median width, intersection control features) and safety. The HSM itself is one of the key breakthroughs in safety research over the past 20 years:
The Highway Safety Manual (HSM) is a major breakthrough in how safety is considered. The HSM provides practitioners with information and tools to consider safety when making decisions related to design and operation of roadways. The HSM assists practitioners in selecting countermeasures and prioritizing projects, comparing alternatives, and quantifying and predicting the safety performance of roadway elements considered in planning, design, construction, maintenance, and operation. Prior to the HSM, there was no widely accepted tool available to quantitatively assess the impact of infrastructure decisions on safety.3
The HSM incorporates SafetyAnalyst technical tools that FHWA helped develop over several years by participating with many states in a pooled-fund effort to conduct research and analysis. The tools developed through this effort are helping
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3 See Fitzpatrick summary of research breakthroughs in operational effects of geometrics, at http://www.trb.org/AboutTRB/KeyResearchAchievements.aspx?srcaud=AboutTRB. Accessed Feb. 15, 2015.
states identify roadway segments with higher-than-expected crash rates and cost-effective safety countermeasures. Thus, SafetyAnalyst allows states to make more effective use of available resources by focusing on particularly hazardous locations where the payoffs in terms of improved safety are potentially the greatest. Engineers in Ohio, for example, have used SafetyAnalyst to identify problem locations more accurately. As a result, in 2010 they focused their attention on 350 particularly hazardous locations covering 95 miles, whereas in previous years they had typically studied about 600 locations covering 900 miles. Ohio is therefore using FHWA-developed tools to identify and target facilities with much higher fatality, injury, and crash rates (Hughes and Council 2012).
FHWA’s assistance in the development of the HSM and SafetyAnalyst illustrates the role that RTCC envisioned when it recommended in 2008 that FHWA invest roughly half of its RD&T funding in this area (TRB 2008).
Supporting Technology Transfer
The success of R&D in highway transportation is measured not by numbers of reports published but by the practical implementation of research results. As noted in Chapter 3, the decentralization of the responsibility for U.S. roads and the strong aversion to risk in the public sector mitigate against the adoption of innovative technologies and approaches. FHWA has long recognized the importance of technology transfer, which is an agency mission that dates back to FHWA’s earliest predecessor organization, the Office of Road Inquiry, established in 1893. In 1998, FHWA restructured its headquarters offices to enable the agency to be more effective in facilitating innovation by creating cross-office integrated product teams, as needed, with responsibility and accountability for the delivery of specific technologies, programs, and other products (TRB 1999). In its 1999 report on technology transfer, RTCC urged FHWA to develop a strategy for its technology transfer efforts and to develop strong partnerships with the agencies at the state and local
levels that implement innovative technologies and approaches (TRB 1999). In MAP-21, Congress recognized the importance of FHWA’s efforts to assist in the deployment of new technologies and processes by authorizing $62.5 million annually for this purpose. With funding made available under this program, FHWA has introduced its Every Day Counts (EDC) initiative and has planned for and begun assisting states in the implementation of products emerging from SHRP 2.
EDC, conducted in concert with the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), is an effort “to identify and rapidly deploy proven but underutilized innovations to shorten the project delivery process, enhance roadway safety, reduce congestion and improve environmental sustainability” (FHWA 2014a, 2). At the time of this writing, FHWA has promoted three rounds of innovations by first gaining support from leaders of state DOTs and then supporting implementation through videos, guidebooks, manuals, and other publications. In support of all of its technology transfer efforts, FHWA develops curricula and offers extensive training to state DOT and other highway agency staff through the National Highway Institute and fosters innovation in local government and tribal transportation departments through local technical assistance programs.
During the waning years of SAFETEA-LU, FHWA began planning, in concert with AASHTO, for the deployment of technologies emerging from SHRP 2. During MAP-21, FHWA has been offering grants to states to assist in the implementation of SHRP 2 products and is poised to accelerate deployment of these innovations as more SHRP 2 products have become available and proved ready for implementation.
FHWA’s role in RD&T—investing in advanced research, filling research gaps and addressing emerging issues with national implications, and supporting technology transfer—will remain
vitally important in the future, and it may become even more important than it has been over the past decades. The challenges facing the highway system will only grow with time in the face of declining real resources. They include increased levels of highway travel associated with population and economic growth on a system that is barely expanding and the need to renew, replace, and make more resilient a vast aging infrastructure built up over the past several decades. Meeting these challenges will require transferring new knowledge from basic research to practical highway applications, taking advantage of new technologies to address congestion and safety, and assisting states and local governments with implementation. RTCC perceives two particularly important areas where FHWA’s role will be essential: (a) development and standardization of the infrastructure components of the connected vehicle initiative and (b) implementation of the innovations developed through SHRP 2.
The U.S. Department of Transportation’s connected vehicle initiative, developed in collaboration with the automobile industry and infrastructure owners, promises to be the most effective highway safety program in many years. In past decades, occupant protection regulations and technology have been introduced and refined; these have dramatically reduced the severity of injuries when crashes occur. Building on advances in information processing and communications technologies, the connected vehicle initiative may dramatically reduce crashes themselves through V2V and V2I communications. The V2V initiative may even serve as a bridge to widespread vehicle automation in future decades. NHTSA estimates that more rapid warnings to drivers of impending collisions from just two of the many possible V2V applications, once they are fully deployed, could save up to 1,000 lives, reduce the severity of tens to hundreds of thousands of injuries, and avoid even more crashes altogether (Harding et al. 2014). The infrastructure component of the connected vehicle initiative would include receipt and transmission of information from traffic signals and roadside
beacons to vehicles.4 Whereas NHTSA is taking the lead on V2V, FHWA is taking the lead in V2I. Because of the lack of standardization in traffic control devices, the exercise of national leadership by FHWA will be essential in engaging stakeholders, providing a national perspective, and ensuring standardization of safety alerts to motorists so that the potentially significant safety benefits of V2I can be realized. The lack of standards can inhibit the pace of innovation. It has taken decades, for example, to make toll transponders interoperable on the east coast of the United States because individual toll authorities began electronic toll collection with different proprietary systems.
As mentioned in Chapter 3, SHRP 2 has recently concluded its 7-year program of R&D and produced dozens of innovations and fresh approaches for renewing infrastructure more rapidly with less disruption to motorists, providing additional capacity while avoiding harm to the environment, improving travel time reliability, and improving safety. The National Research Council committee charged by Congress with reporting on implementation of SHRP 2 technologies identified FHWA as the one organization “best positioned to administer SHRP 2 implementation” because of its experience with implementation of products from the first SHRP and its close relationship to the states (TRB 2009b). Lack of incentives, barriers to implementation, and lack of capability and resources make any other organization unlikely to provide the necessary technology push so that the nation will reap the benefits of the substantial investment in SHRP 2 research.
The essential future role for FHWA is a natural extension of its current role: investing in long-term, high-risk research; filling gaps and addressing issues of national significance that are not addressed by other programs; and supporting the transfer
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4 An overview of the Cooperative Intersection Collision Avoidance Systems program and research in support of it appears at http://www.its.dot.gov/cicas/ (accessed Feb. 25, 2015).
of proven innovations emerging from all research programs to public-sector owners of highway infrastructure. FHWA plays an essential role for the following reasons:
- FHWA is better positioned than are individual states to take a longer view in R&D. This allows the agency to conduct advanced research to harvest breakthroughs in basic research for application in transportation; conduct long-term pavement and bridge experiments to collect necessary data to improve infrastructure performance; and carry out complex, long-term R&D with the automobile industry and infrastructure owners in the connected vehicle initiative, which will help avoid vast numbers of crashes in the future.
- FHWA, with its national perspective, can lead states in the development and transfer of tools and processes, such as SafetyAnalyst, DDIs, and pricing of high-occupancy lanes, that improve safety and system capacity at less cost.
- With its economies of scale and offices in each state, FHWA is uniquely positioned to identify and support the implementation of innovations by states and local agencies.
The opportunities for carrying out this role are particularly promising in V2I development and standardization and in deployment of the products from SHRP 2 research. Only FHWA has the national perspective, leadership, resources, and ability to invest for the long term to carry out these responsibilities to the benefit of the nation as a whole.
