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Increasingly, departments of transportation (DOTs) are being subjected to higher maintenance costs because of extreme weather events. Maintenance managers are not imagining things; the amount of rainfall during intense precipitation has increased 20% over the past century. A survey of DOTs shows that maintenance demands in response to flooding and snowfall have increased precipitously in many states. This study began with a discussion at the 2011 AASHTO maintenance meeting and proceeded with an inquiry to all 50 states to scan the growth in extreme weather events and the impacts that DOTs have experienced. The impacts of the increase in wind, dust storms, snow and ice, flooding, and other events are discussed in this paper, with some attention devoted to the impacts of rising sea levels and erosion. The case studies reported here of extreme weather events offer a place to start to assess the potential costs of climate change, at least in the initial years, and to plan for adaptation. Recommendations by DOT maintenance and operation managers on how to respond to extreme weather events are also summarized in this paper.

Transportation agencies nationwide are under pressure to help address a wider range of transportation issues than ever before in the United States. Many of them extend beyond traditional state department of transportation (DOT) activities and span of control. There is an interconnection between transportation and land use that the public and local decision makers do not often see. Yet the public frequently holds DOTs responsible for solving transportation problems resulting from local and regional land use decisions and preferred development patterns. The objective of this research is to identify and explore successful innovations in integrating transportation and land use planning for transportation corridors, with a focus on practices that could be transferred to other locations. A case study approach was used to identify projects that integrated, rather than merely linked, land use and transportation planning and decision making. This paper summarizes six case studies: Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, Illinois; Envision Utah and the Mountain View Environmental Impact Statement, Utah; Gateway Route 1, Maine; NJFIT: Future in Transportation, New Jersey; UnJAM 2025 and Places29, Virginia; and MetroVision and Blueprint Denver, Colorado. The paper also analyzes practices and lessons learned, highlighting common themes among the case studies.

Context-sensitive solutions, value engineering or value analysis, and asset management systems are all strategic processes or systems with common objectives, even if they have different emphases. All place a high value on customer satisfaction, stakeholder values, and the delivery or maintenance of safe facilities. All stress the efficient and effective use of resources and the alignment of investments to produce the best outcomes or the most quality for the money. All are open to a broad interpretation of the word “best,” but they are challenged by the measurement of performance in areas that are more difficult to quantify. They share an emphasis on transparency, multidisciplinary teams and perspectives, and analytical, evidence-based decision making. They use processes that examine multiple alternatives to finding consensus on ultimate decisions. Especially when they are used together or in tandem, these tools and systems can be used as part of strategic and systematic approaches that have a significant potential for the delivery of transportation assets with greater sustainability and public funding and support for transportation, the community, and the natural environment. This paper examines the principles, similarities, and opportunities for reinforcement of these approaches.

This paper examines how the environmental management system (EMS) at departments of transportation (DOTs) has evolved and provides examples of recent developments and practices that other DOTs can consider and use as a source in an evolving EMS. A number of practical insights can be gained by examining EMS experiences at several DOTs. Generally, the EMSs that have delivered benefits have had successful mechanisms for monitoring effectiveness, incorporating lessons learned, and managing continual improvement. They have relied tactically on what exists already, are geared toward the organization's mission, and seek to support success in nonenvironmental areas. They build on vigorous environmental programs, have procedures that can be integrated as much as possible into current routine practices, and strive to demystify environmental compliance for both DOT and contractor personnel. DOTs in the vanguard have focused on increased compliance assurance and cost-effectiveness, adoption and development of best management practices and sustainability practices, enhanced land and resource use planning and management, accelerating and streamlining the project delivery processes, and improved intergovernmental relationships and stakeholder confidence. Challenges commonly include coping with the demands of intensive up-front effort with limited staff time, realistically quantifying resource requirements, and establishing straightforward metrics for monitoring. Effective management has been enhanced in some cases by using information technology tools, which facilitate the flow of environmental information; tracking metrics; tracking project schedules, budgets, and personnel; communicating corporate knowledge; analyzing impacts; and using geo-references for planning stage decision making.

Although the development and lending communities have become much more aware of transit-oriented development (TOD) in the past 5 years, the lending process remains highly institutionalized and compartmentalized. TOD developers still face significant challenges in obtaining financing and structuring deals. After a brief review of common sources and structures of financing, this paper details obstacles to financing that TOD developers face, starting with the increasingly high risk attached to construction lending and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's recent actions emphasizing increased bank oversight in this area. Complexity, design, and construction challenges, along with mixed-use and related lender concerns, compound the difficulties presented by the relative newness of the mixed-use, TOD product, as compared with the conventional real estate products that are more commonly underwritten and traded on the secondary market. This puts more pressure on TOD developers to present a solid equity position and prove that they have the know-how and wherewithal to carry a risky project through. Strategies to overcome these barriers to TOD financing include the structuring of uses to align with existing product categories, value engineering and the use of alternative building methods and materials, use of advanced information management systems, addition of large or experienced partners, and gain of higher-equity, patient investment. Finally, presenting the local and national market demand for TOD may help increase financiers' understanding of the unique benefits offered by TOD, and of its potential upside. Local governments can help by developing supportive plans and appropriate zoning, building public support, and streamlining the process to create a more predictable environment for developers and lenders.

Some of the most extensive information management and decision support systems at state departments of transportation (DOTs) are used in maintenance for condition tracking, work planning, budget estimation, and quality assurance. DOTs are confronted with the challenge of managing these and emerging environmental information and decision support needs in integrated systems that incorporate transportation and environmental assets and quality and the activities, materials, labor, budget, and tools needed to assess and manage them. Systems integration remains an elusive goal. Although a few states are pursuing integrated asset management systems, recent leaps forward have been frequently limited to integration of management systems within a single functional area, e.g., integration of Pontis for bridge management with Virtis to bridge load rating. In that decentralized context, this paper presents several leading examples or best practices in asset and maintenance quality management in various areas of maintenance where environmental aspects that are difficult to quantify have begun to be incorporated.

Measuring environmental performance presents a new set of challenges for state transportation agencies, many of which have been using measures for years to track transportation-related characteristics of the system. Challenges associated with environmental performance measures and the roles of performance measurement in the environmental area were reviewed, highlighting the key role of stakeholder satisfaction. Some of the attempts to measure environmental performance at state transportation agencies around the country, the different areas of focus, and actual environmental performance measures in use were examined.

Starting in January 2000, FHWA, the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and partners at public and private resource organizations came together to design an impact assessment and advance a mitigation and conservation banking process to aid in the recovery of declining species on Colorado’s Eastern Plains. The Shortgrass Prairie Initiative provides programmatic clearance for CDOT activities on the existing road network in the eastern third of Colorado for the next 20 years—through 2022; addresses 3 listed and more than 20 declining species with the greatest likelihood of being listed as threatened or endangered; and covers 90,000 acres of right-of-way in four of CDOT’s six regions. The agencies involved sought to invest resources, which would otherwise be spent on a project-by-project clearance process, in more comprehensive and proactive species conservation that would help alleviate the need for further listings and improve predictability in the project development process. Methodologically, the project focused on impacts to habitats rather than species individuals and estimated potential impacts using best available data, supplemented by expert opinion. The resulting project offers programmatic clearance with 1:1 (that is, 1 acre of impact to 1 acre of conservation/mitigation) habitat conservation, regulatory streamlining, cost savings in several categories, and more effective habitat and species preservation. The uniqueness of this project stems from its primary focus on species currently unlisted as federally threatened or endangered, coverage of major as well as minor projects, and the scale at which conservation is being pursued, including planned preservation of approximately 15,000 to 20,000 acres from 2002 onward.