Advanced Highway and Transportation Engineering

Description

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. Developed countries are constantly faced with high maintenance cost of aging transportation highways. The growth of the motor vehicle industry and accompanying economic growth has generated a demand for safer, better performing, less congested highways. The growth of commerce, educational institutions, housing, and defense have largely drawn from government budgets in the past, making the financing of public highways a challenge. Highway and transportation engineers must meet many safety, service, and performance standards when designing highways for certain site topography. Highway geometric design primarily refers to the visible elements of the highways. Highway engineers who design the geometry of highways must also consider environmental and social effects of the design on the surrounding infrastructure. Mobility is a basic human need. From the times immemorial, everyone travels either for food or leisure. A closely associated need is the transport of raw materials to a manufacturing unit or finished goods for consumption. Transportation fulfills these basic needs of humanity. Transportation plays a major role in the development of the human civilization. For instance, one could easily observe the strong correlation between the evolution of human settlement and the proximity of transport facilities. Also, there is a strong correlation between the quality of transport facilities and standard of living, because of which society places a great expectation from transportation facilities. The book addresses these issues and it is hoped that the engineering students studying transportation engineering will have a clear idea of the problems involved and how they transportation engineering will have a clear idea of the problems involved and how they can be overcome in their professional career.