Overview of the First Ten Years of the Minnesota Road Research Project
Publication: Journal of Transportation Engineering
Volume 133, Issue 11
Abstract
The Minnesota Department of Transportation began construction on the Minnesota Road Research Project (MnROAD) in 1991 and opened the full-scale pavement research facility to live traffic in 1994. Since the time of its construction, MnROAD, the first major test track since the AASHO Road Test of the 1950s and 1960s, has learned a number of lessons on behalf of the greater pavement community. As part of completing the first phase of MnROAD (its first ten years of operation), researchers at the University of Minnesota reviewed the many products of MnROAD’s first phase for a project titled “MnROAD Lessons Learned.” The Lessons Learned Project involved over fifty interviews, three hundred published and unpublished reports, papers, and briefs, and an online survey of pavement professionals. This paper, based on the Lessons Learned Project, presents an overview of MnROAD products of interest at the local, state, and national levels. Furthermore, the paper provides extensive references for these products in the hopes of increasing awareness of MnROAD’s under-publicized contributions to pavement engineering.
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Acknowledgments
The writers acknowledge the assistance of Ben Worel, MnROAD Operations Engineer, in multiple phases of the Lessons Learned project. Furthermore, the writers thank Tim Clyne, Shongtao Dai, Bernard Izevbekhai, Maureen Jensen, Greg Johnson, Marc Loken, Roger Olson, John Pantelis, and John Siekmeier of Mn/DOT’s Office of Materials and Road Research and all survey respondents and interview subjects for their contributions to the Lessons Learned Project.
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Information
Published In
Journal of Transportation Engineering
Volume 133 • Issue 11 • November 2007
Pages: 599 - 609
Copyright
© 2007 ASCE.
History
Received: Oct 16, 2006
Accepted: Feb 27, 2007
Published online: Nov 1, 2007
Published in print: Nov 2007
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