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22 State departments of transportation (DOTs) handle utility issues in diverse ways; there are few common threads. Even federal guidance documents from FHWA and AASHTO are routinely used by fewer than 60% of the states. On the other hand, virtually all state DOTs follow their in-state utility accommodation policies, which reference some of these other documents. Most of these policies are general in nature and pertain mostly to cost-reimbursement issues. There is a real need to better evaluate and weigh the costs of relocating a utility versus accommodating it in place through design considerations for the benefit of the citizen who is both the ratepayer and the taxpayer. This is understandable given the budget considerations of the DOTs and the historical per- spective that highways are primarily for vehicular transporta- tion and utility occupancy is a privilege. The lack of available and pertinent literature on the topic indicates that not much attention has been paid to the issue. These attitudes are slowly changing as the impacts of relocat- ing utilities are beginning to be measured more accurately and comprehensively, such as road-user costs for lane closures. The increasing costs for utility materials, construction labor, and engineering are also a factor that DOTs can no longer ignore, along with time concerns owing to the lack of trained and expe- rienced professional and technical staff from the utilities. Recently, there has been a significant effort from several DOTs to address utility issues with new technologies, philoso- phies, and procedures. There is also an increased national emphasis on utility issues that has resulted in significant research efforts. Translating this research into practice remains a challenge. An entire branch of civil engineering practice, subsurface utility engineering (SUE), has evolved to address the very issues raised in this study. The unintentional but very real misperception that SUE is just an expensive version of One- Call has hampered DOTs over the years. There is some jus- tification for this perception in the lack of qualifications and performance in the early SUE industry. Now that mainstream engineering firms, municipalities, private project owners, and others are embracing the concepts of utility risk management and performing SUE services this perception could change as services improve and noncapable providers are selected less often by DOTs. The concepts of altering a highway design to accommo- date existing utilities are not as well represented in the lit- erature or in past studies as might be imagined, given the pervasiveness of utility issues and highway design. Several research projects with bearing on the problem are underway or planned for the near future. Five of these projects dealing with the broad topics of utility data storage and retrieval, util- ity locating and mapping technologies, and utility coordina- tion and conflict identification, are currently underway under the auspices of the SHRP 2 program. Other research needs include: ⢠Addressing utilities on design-build projects, ⢠Adapting standards for utility âas-buildingâ during installation, ⢠Developing effective utility relocation cost databases, ⢠Integrating utility relocation cost databases with three- dimensional modeling of utility conflicts, ⢠Analyzing condition assessment with relocation deci- sions, ⢠Evaluating performance of utilities when relocation is to a geotechnically or seismically suspect area, and ⢠Factoring in the cost of protective measures when utili- ties are not relocated away from construction areas. CHAPTER EIGHT CONCLUSIONS
