Highway Engineering: Planning, Design, and Operations

DANIEL J. FINDLEY

Preference :

Highway engineering is a subset of transportation engineering, which itself is typically a component of civil engineering. The presence of more than 4 million miles of public roads in the United States (BTS, 2014) serving widely varying traffic volumes and trip purposes, emphasizes the need for qualified and capable professionals to address problems and improve the system. Two primary metrics of quality of highways are efficiency (measured by delay, travel time, speed, or other operational characteristics) and safety (measured by collisions or fatalities). An inefficient highway can have detrimental effects on local and regional economies and drivers, by burdening the movement of goods and people with additional costs and loss of productivity. The continual improvement of highways is also essential to reduce deaths resulting from collisions on roadways, which, in the United States, totaled 33,561 fatalities in 2012 (NHTSA, 2014).