LESSONS LEARNED IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF "FLEXIBILITY IN HIGHWAY DESIGN"

In October 1997, the Federal Highway Administration of the United States Department of Transportation published a technical report entitled Flexibility in Highway Design (FHWA-PD-97-062). This represented the culmination of a three-year research effort on the part of a multidisciplinary consultant team to define the manner in which state and local transportation agencies were incorporating aesthetic, historic, and cultural resource considerations into the highway design process. As noted in the foreword to this report: ...the guide builds on the flexibility in current laws and regulations to explore opportunities to use flexible design as a tool to help sustain important community interests without compromising safety. This report served as an impetus for ongoing efforts to change some of the most fundamental tenets of the highway design philosophy that had been employed in the United States over the preceding 50 years. The document was the primary reference distributed to the participants in the May 1998 conference Thinking Beyond the Pavement: A National Workshop on Integrating Highway Development with Communities and the Environment. The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of Flexibility in Highway Design from the perspective of the author, who served as the Co-Principal Investigator for the project and the principal co-author of the report. The paper traces the history of the project from its inception through publication of the final report. A particular emphasis of the discussion is on case studies of successful highway design projects throughout the United States. These case studies illustrate how the supposedly new concept of design flexibility is, in reality, nothing more than the application of classical engineering design principles. The projects described range from major urban arterials to minor country roads, in environments as diverse as midtown Manhattan and the Oregon Pacific Coast.