After road construction, soil in revegetation areas must retain adequate stormwater and provide stable embankments along the road. Revegetation can be challenging due to thin topsoil, and it often requires importing healthy organic soil and exporting excess construction soil generally unsuitable for plant growth.
Continue reading Reusing Local Byproducts in Sustainably Designed SoilsMaintaining Minnesota’s 14,000 miles of pavement is challenging, especially with the growth in traffic volume resulting in system needs that exceed available funding. New ways to characterize pavement conditions and methodologies to determine the optimal maintenance schedule for individual road segments will allow planners to optimize resources while providing the highest possible ride quality across the pavement network.
Continue reading Optimizing Pavement Network MaintenanceWith the number of automated vehicles increasing on our roadways it is important to understand their potential impacts and how other road users will interact with them. In the future, there will be a more pronounced shared levels-of-automation transportation network, with fully manual, partially automated, and fully automated vehicles sharing the same Minnesota roads. While planners and engineers have a reasonable idea of how humans drive around other humans, what is not as well-known is human driving behavior around automated vehicles.
Continue reading New Project: Assessment of Pedestrian Safety and Driver Behavior Near Automated VehiclesTransportation is a crucial contributor to health: it not only directly shapes the social and physical environments in myriad ways, but it also determines the types of places where people can live, learn, work, and play in their everyday life.
Continue reading Webinar Recording: The Health and Transportation NexusMnDOT’s existing and future assets will become increasingly stressed by extreme weather patterns due to climate change. Minnesota’s assets are particularly vulnerable to projected precipitation increases and larger and more frequent extreme storm events.
Continue reading Webinar Recording: Extreme Flood Vulnerability Assessment ToolTransportation has the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions in the US, and trucks make up a significant proportion of that. Most states and local governments have plans to significantly reduce air pollution caused by transportation. The widespread use of electric vehicles is a primary means to achieve that goal. While personal electric vehicles have found their way to the automobile market and charging infrastructures are becoming more available in urban areas, electric trucks would have a bumpy road to being adopted en masse. This is due to the lack of widespread charging infrastructure and incentivizing policies, as well as technical and operational challenges confronting the trucking industries.
Continue reading CTS Webinar: Electrification of the Freight System in Minnesota—Barriers, Opportunities, and a Multicriteria Planning ToolProviding consistent freeway travel times for Twin Cities area drivers requires careful traffic management and well-planned freeway projects. To effectively respond to incidents and identify the most needed renovations, MnDOT traffic managers need to know precisely where, when and why congestion is happening.
Continue reading Making Freeway Travel Times in the Twin Cities Area More ReliableUsing drones to inspect bridges allows MnDOT to collect very high quality data while exposing fewer inspectors to far less risk and reducing inconvenience to the public. A new fleet of UAS will be used to conduct inspections statewide.
Continue reading Drone Technology Enhances Bridge InspectionsTransportation is a crucial contributor to health: it not only directly shapes the social and physical environments in myriad ways, but it also determines the types of places where people can live, learn, work, and play in their everyday life.
Continue reading CTS Webinar: The Health and Transportation Nexus—A Unified Model Integrating Multiple Mechanisms for Collaborative PlanningDiversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are becoming increasingly important factors in the modern workforce. Integrating DEI is not only a strong moral move that can set an organization apart from its peers but also a way to promote innovation, attract talent, and retain valuable employees in a tight labor market.
Continue reading Diversity and Equity in the Freight Industry: A Moral—and Smart—Business Move
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