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.
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.
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