Highway engineering (also known as roadway engineering and street engineering) is a professional engineering discipline branching from the civil engineering subdiscipline of transportation engineering that involves the planning, design, construction, operation, and maintenance of roads, highways, streets, 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.
The beginning of road construction could be dated to the time of the Romans. With the advancement of technology from carriages pulled by two horses to vehicles with power equivalent to 100 horses, road development had to follow suit. The construction of modern highways did not begin until the late 19th to early 20th century.
The first research dedicated to highway engineering was initiated in the United Kingdom with the introduction of the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL), in 1930. In the US, highway engineering became an important discipline with the passing of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944, which aimed to connect 90% of cities with a population of 50,000 or more. With constant stress from vehicles which grew larger as time passed, improvements to pavements were needed. With technology out of date, in 1958 the construction of the first motorway in Great Britain (the Preston bypass) played a major role in the development of new pavement technology.
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.
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Le cours « Infrastructures de transport II » permet de maitriser les principes de base de la réalisation et de la maintenance des infrastructures de transport routières et ferroviaires. Ce cours décri
Creating performing infrastructures for transport systems have to consider effects and impacts on environment and safety. Managing transport systems and considering maintenance work impact the choices
A controlled-access highway is a type of highway that has been designed for high-speed vehicular traffic, with all traffic flow—ingress and egress—regulated. Common English terms are freeway, motorway and expressway. Other similar terms include throughway (or thruway) and parkway. Some of these may be limited-access highways, although this term can also refer to a class of highways with somewhat less isolation from other traffic. In countries following the Vienna convention, the motorway qualification implies that walking and parking are forbidden.
Road traffic safety refers to the methods and measures used to prevent road users from being killed or seriously injured. Typical road users include pedestrians, cyclists, motorists, vehicle passengers, horse riders, and passengers of on-road public transport (mainly buses and trams). Best practices in modern road safety strategy: The basic strategy of a Safe System approach is to ensure that in the event of a crash, the impact energies remain below the threshold likely to produce either death or serious injury.
In civil engineering (more specifically highway engineering), grade separation is a method of aligning a junction of two or more surface transport axes at different heights (grades) so that they will not disrupt the traffic flow on other transit routes when they cross each other. The composition of such transport axes does not have to be uniform; it can consist of a mixture of roads, footpaths, railways, canals, or airport runways.
In this thesis, we developed a research direction that combines the theoretical concepts of complex networks with practical needs and applications in the field of transportation engineering.
As a first objective we analyzed the phenomenon of congestion pr ...
In smart cities, ensuring road safety and optimizing transportation efficiency heavily relies on streamlined road condition monitoring. The application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has notably enhanced the capability to detect road surfaces effectively. ...
Recently, an open-data initiative was announced with one of the most complete datasets to study urban congestion. The pNEUMA dataset consists of more than half a million trajectories in heterogeneous traffic. In order to utilize the dataset for macroscopic ...