Load testing of bridges to assess bridge performance has been in practice since at least 1891 in Switzerland. In times when engineering models were not as accurate and available as today, a critical step in the construction of a bridge was to load test prior to opening or during the opening ceremony of the bridge. Several bridges, including ones in Serbia, Switzerland, and France, collapsed during such load tests. While advanced calculation methods are available to determine the ultimate capacity of exis...

Automated vehicles, shared mobility, and other transformational technologies in transportation provide a unique opportunity to make significant advances in meeting societal goals. TRB's Transportation Research E-Circular 253: Transformational Technologies in Transportation: Impacts on Traditional Research Processes and Programs explores whether and how, in an era of rapidly evolving transformational technologies, research projects and processes can provide the needed answers in a timely manner while stil...

On April 9–10, 2019, 127 freight community members— including transportation professionals from transportation planning agencies, independent consultants, industry experts, and academic researchers from across North America—participated in the second Innovations in Freight Data Workshop in Irvine, California. Alison Conway from City College of New York chaired the planning committee for this workshop. Transportation Research Circular E-C255: Innovations in Freight Data Workshop includes summaries of the ...

Information exchanged during the 97th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board in a session titled "Relationship Between Laboratory Cracking Tests and Field Performance of Asphalt Mixtures" is captured in Transportation Research Circular E-C251: Relationship Between Laboratory Cracking Tests and Field Performance of Asphalt Mixtures . The document explores a significant amount of work that has gone into a variety of laboratory asphalt mixture cracking test methods to improve the durability of ...

How do we bring governance into the era of digitization so it can manage demand and supply digitally? At the same time, it is necessary to correct for the existing inequities in our system, working closer with public- and private-sector partners and developing the infrastructure needed to ensure that the transition to shared and autonomous vehicles (SAVs) minimizes the potential challenges and takes advantage of opportunities. This transition and its effects will not happen tomorrow, and there are severa...

Traditionally, pavement management decision-making has relied on surface cracking as an indicator of structural condition. However, with early-intervention preservation activities to extend the life of pavements, surface cracks no longer are a reliable indicator of structural condition. In the past 15 years, traffic speed deflection devices (TSDDs) have been developed to measure pavement structural condition at traffic speed. A 2019 Transportation Research Board (TRB) workshop, which is detailed here in ...

The emergence of drug-impaired driving, notably marijuana-impaired driving, is a priority concern among road-safety stakeholders. In particular, the availability and potency of marijuana has increased, and the legalization of different forms of marijuana has occurred in many jurisdictions around the world. Of equal concern, in comparison to alcohol, much less is known about marijuana and driving in terms of the prevalence of the problem, the consequences on driving performance, and strategies to manage m...

TRB’s Technical Activities Division has released Transportation Research Circular E-C249: Key Elements of Construction Quality Assurance for Implementation, presenting a synopsis of " Quality Assurance: There’s Value in the Basics," held at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board. In this session, four speakers with a range of perspectives—the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), state transportation agencies, and a contractor—presented on key elements and best practices for imple...

TRB’s Technical Activities Division has released Transportation Research Circular E-C248: 12th International Conference on Low-Volume Roads, highlighting topics including road surfaces, geotechnology, cold regions and climate change, pavement management, planning and economics, unpaved roads management, geosynthetics in low-volume roads, drainage and stream crossings, climate change resiliency, stabilization, and safety.

TRB’s Technical Activities Division has released Transportation Research Circular E-C245: Transportation Oral History: State of the Practice and a Path Forward that highlights the availability of more than 1,000 transportation oral histories and includes a proposal for the creation of a guidebook that transportation organizations could use to create their own oral histories. The circular also explores core topics associated with the collection of new oral histories including purpose, interviewee selectio...