Harnessing the Power of Innovation to Improve America's Driving Experience: Report on the Highways for Life Program
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2012-01-01
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Abstract:America’s highway system faces a significant challenge: an aging infrastructure, growing traffic volumes and limited resources—both staffing and funding—make the widespread use of innovation to meet customer needs essential. The Federal Highway Administration is addressing this challenge through the Highways for LIFE initiative, a pilot program the U.S. Congress established in 2005. The Highways for LIFE initiative focuses on using proven marketing approaches and dedicated teams to deploy innovations faster and more effectively. It gives highway agencies incentives to try innovations to build highways and bridges. It helps private industry move promising innovations into the marketplace, where they can benefit the traveling public. And it provides the highway community with tools, techniques and training to create culture change in their own organizations. This report describes how FHWA, working with highway community stakeholders, has carried out the initiative. Through the initiative’s Vanguard Technologies effort, FHWA developed a technology deployment process that combines multidisciplinary teams, marketing techniques and focused effort to move innovations all the way to full implementation. The process, field tested on five technologies, is designed to deploy technology quickly and efficiently so that years don’t elapse between the time research is done and highway users benefit from an innovation. FHWA also created a training program and a guide to developing marketing plans that organizations are using to launch their own innovation deployment efforts. Highways for LIFE has helped highway agencies try new approaches by offering incentive funding for construction projects that employ proven but little-used innovations to boost safety and quality while speeding construction and minimizing impact on travelers. Since fiscal year 2006, the program has provided incentives totaling more than $55 million for 60 projects in 37 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico that feature innovations such as accelerated bridge construction techniques, precast concrete pavement systems and new contracting methods. Many projects feature showcases that draw transportation professionals from around the country to view innovations in person and learn from their peers what it takes to deploy them.
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