8.1 Road engineering

Highway engineering

Highway engineering is an engineering discipline branching from civil engineering that involves the planning, design, construction, operation, and maintenance of roads, bridges, and tunnels to ensure safe and effective transportation of people and goods. Highway engineering became prominent towards the latter half of the 20th century after World War II. Standards of highway engineering are continuously being improved. Highway engineers must take into account future traffic flows, design of highway intersections/interchanges, geometric alignment and design, highway pavement materials and design, structural design of pavement thickness, and pavement maintenance.

Highway planning involves the estimation of current and future traffic volumes on a road network. The Highway planning is also a basic need for the Highway development. Highway engineers strive to predict and analyze all possible civil impacts of highway systems. Some considerations are the adverse effects on the environment, such as noise pollution, air pollution, water pollution, and other ecological impacts.

Highway systems generate the highest price in human injury and death, as nearly 50 million persons are injured in traffic accidents every year, not including the 1.2 million deaths. Road traffic injury is the single leading cause of unintentional death in the first five decades of human life.

Management of safety is a systematic process that strives to reduce the occurrence and severity of traffic accidents. The man/machine interaction with road traffic systems is unstable and poses a challenge to highway safety management. The key for increasing the safety of highway systems is to design, build, and maintain them to be far more tolerant of the average range of this man/machine interaction with highways. Technological advancements in highway engineering have improved the design, construction, and maintenance methods used over the years. These advancements have allowed for newer highway safety innovations.

By ensuring that all situations and opportunities are identified, considered, and implemented as appropriate, they can be evaluated in every phase of highway planning, design, construction, maintenance, and operation to increase the safety of our highway systems.

How Are Highways Designed?

Video from Practical Engineering

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XIjqdk69O4

Quiz

Topic Discussion

References

 Rogers, Martin (2002). Highway engineering. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Science. ISBN 978-0-632-05993-5.

 O'Flaherty, edited by C.A. (2002). Highways the location, design, construction and maintenance of road pavements (4th ed.). Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann. ISBN 978-0-7506-5090-8.

 "Highway engineering." McGraw-Hill Concise Encyclopedia of Science and Technology. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006. Credo Reference. Web. 13 February 2013.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_engineering#Planning_and_development