During the 2011 construction season, the Virginia Department of Transportation completed an in-place pavement recycling project to rehabilitate a 3.66-mi section of pavement on southbound I-81 in Augusta County near Staunton. In 2008, the directional traffic volume was 23,000 vehicles per day with 28% being trucks (85% of the truck traffic consisted of five- and six-axle tractor trailer combination vehicles). This section of the Interstate showed structurally related deterioration at the pavement surface, had a low structural capacity, and had a history of frequently recurring maintenance. The construction project used three in-place pavement recycling techniques (full-depth reclamation, cold central-plant recycling, and cold in-place recycling) and a unique lane-closure schedule to accomplish the work. A construction contract with a value of $7.64 million and a time frame of approximately 8 months was awarded in December 2010. The in-place recycling portion of the work was completed in fewer than 20 workdays spanning 6 weeks. This construction work represents the first time in the United States that those three recycling techniques were combined in one project on the Interstate system, and the project showed that the construction techniques can be used on higher-volume facilities. The construction techniques and the traffic management plan are described, and the results of acceptance testing and initial field testing are discussed. Suggestions for future study based on lessons learned during this project are offered.

Safety service patrol (SSP) programs are widely used to help mitigate the effects of nonrecurring congestion and have become an increasingly vital element of incident management programs. In recent years, some state departments of transportation have initiated return-on-investment evaluations of their SSP programs. The purpose of this project was to use Virginia data to develop methods to evaluate and quantify the benefits of SSP programs; this involved developing a methodology to determine incident durations with and without SSPs for the Northern Virginia region and applying the results to a model to quantify the benefits associated with reductions in motorist delay, fuel consumption, and emissions attributable to SSP operations. To verify the general applicability of the methodology, the evaluation procedure was applied to the Hampton Roads, Virginia, SSP. The results showed that incident duration reductions attributable to SSP operations in these two areas resulted in benefit–cost ratios of 5.4:1 and 4.7:1, respectively. The methodology developed can be used by other agencies that have the means to collect and archive incident duration and location data. The amount of effort involved in applying the methodology is dependent on the type of data collected by the SSP and the state police and the level of integration of SSPs and computer-aided-dispatch databases in those regions.

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FHWA's Final Rule on Work Zone Safety and Mobility, which is part of the Code of Federal Regulations, requires transportation management plans (TMPs) for all federally funded roadway construction projects. These plans are a documented combination of traffic control, public relations, and transportation demand operations strategies designed to mitigate the impacts that work zones can have on safety and mobility. A key component in TMPs is monitoring and assessing traffic impacts to incorporate lessons learned into future TMPs. The Virginia Department of Transportation (DOT) sought to formalize a process to assess individual TMPs and TMPs at an agencywide level. This paper summarizes the rationale and steps taken to develop this TMP assessment process. This process, which has been developed in the form of Virginia DOT's new TMP performance assessment guidelines and postconstruction report form, is outlined for various project complexities.

Many states have implemented truck lane restrictions in an attempt to improve safety and mobility on freeways. These restrictions typically prohibit trucks from traveling in the median (left-most) lane of multi-lane highways; the restriction potentially increases passing opportunities and reduces negative interactions between slow-moving trucks and faster-moving vehicles. Virginia has restricted trucks from the median lane of some interstates with three or more lanes by direction since 1997, but no systematic evaluation of the safety impact of the restrictions has been conducted. Evaluations of similar restrictions in other states have yielded contradictory findings, but those studies often used a limited data set. An empirical Bayes’ analysis of Virginia's restrictions was performed by using 6 years of crash data from 22 sites with restrictions and 16 similar sites without restrictions. The analysis showed that a breakpoint in safety performance occurred around 10,000 vehicles per day per lane. Facilities where the volume was below this threshold had significantly fewer crashes than anticipated, averaging a 13% reduction in total crashes and a 32% reduction in fatal and injury crashes. Sites where the volume exceeded this threshold had increases in total crashes and fatal or injury crashes of 28% and 23%, respectively. A detailed analysis of crashes on the higher-volume roads was conducted to screen out crashes in which the restrictions likely played no role. That analysis showed that the number of truck-involved crashes was still significantly higher than predicted, indicating that safety on higher-volume roads may be negatively affected by truck lane restrictions.