Transportation and Ethics 30 PDH Discount Package

This online engineering PDH course introduces engineers to the National Society of Professional Engineers Code of Ethics. The Code provides ethical guidance to engineers in their various and often simultaneously held roles as 1) guardians of public health, safety, and welfare 2) employees, 3) employers, and 4) providers of technical service to clients.

Engineers practicing their profession encounter not only technical issues but also ethical issues. Sometimes the latter issues are easy to resolve: applying everyday, common-sense notions of honesty, openness, responsibility, and lawfulness is sufficient to guide the engineer to the appropriate decision. At other times, however, matters are more complicated. In particular, knowing what to do when two or more duties or obligations conflict can be difficult. For example, an engineer's duty to his client or employer may conflict with the engineer's duty to the general public. Codes of ethics have been formulated to help engineers address these conflicts.

This 1 PDH online course is intended for all engineers who are interested in gaining a better understanding about how to protect and respect their engineering profession in the utmost manner.

This online engineering PDH course contains updated recommendations excerpted from the 2001 handbook. The recommendations do not constitute a new standard of required practice but are instead intended to supplement existing standards and guidelines in the areas of highway geometry, operations, and traffic control devices.  The recommendations provide guidance that is firmly grounded in an understanding of older drivers' and pedestrians' needs and capabilities, and can significantly enhance the safety and ease of use of the highway system for older persons, and for the driving population as a whole.

In 1998, FHWA published the Older Driver Highway Design Handbook, seeking to provide highway engineers with practical information linking the declining functional capabilities of older road users to the need for design, operational, and traffic engineering enhancements keyed to specific roadway features. Early experiences with the recommendations, including extensive feedback from local- and State-level practitioners through workshops conducted for departments of transportation across the country in 1999 and 2000, indicated a need to revise and update this resource. The result was a new handbook, the Highway Design Handbook for Older Drivers and Pedestrians, published in 2001.

The course also provides supplemental technical information not found in the full handbook.  The information is provided to explain (1) how specific diminished capabilities lead to age-related driving problems; (2) license renewal requirements and distinctions for older drivers in each State in the U.S.; and (3) how and why to conduct visibility measurements to ensure that various pavement marking treatments covered in the Handbook serve the needs of older road users. These materials are included to support practitioners in exercising the engineering judgment often called upon to reach implementation decisions.

This 7 PDH online course is intended for civil and transportation engineers concerned with the design and maintenance of road systems.

This online engineering PDH course provides clear and practical information on the construction and maintenance of gravel roads. It includes many photographs of existing roads that show examples of both good and poor practices in maintenance and design. Given the importance of gravel roads to the economy, especially of rural areas, engineers must understand maintenance and design issues associated with gravel roads.

The United States has over 1.6 million miles of gravel roads, amounting to about 53% of the country’s total road mileage.  Gravel roads are usually considered greatly inferior to paved roads, but in many rural regions the volume of traffic is so low that paving and maintaining a paved road is not economically feasible.

Yet gravel roads serve important functions: providing a means of getting agricultural products in and out of farm fields, timber out of forests, or providing access to remote areas such as campgrounds and lakes. Many gravel roads serve rural residents as well. 

This 8 PDH online course is intended for local agency officials, managers, civil, and transportation engineers concerned with the construction and maintenance of gravel roads.

This online engineering PDH course discusses the use of safety shoulders as travel lanes to increase the capacity of existing highways.  A succinct overview of efforts to use left or right shoulder lanes as temporary or interim travel lanes is presented.  The impact on highway performance, operations, safety, maintenance, enforcement, incident response, and costs is discussed.  Detailed case studies are presented for four U.S. states and three European countries.

This 7 PDH online course is intended for civil, highway and transportation engineers involved in transportation planning, design and implementation.

This online engineering PDH course is a primer on managed lanes and provides the transportation engineer or planner an overview of the implementation and operation of managed lanes.

Many transportation agencies face a growing demand for increasing road capacity, even though budgets are static or increasing very slowly.  As a result, the agencies are considering using lane management strategies that regulate demand, separate traffic streams to reduce turbulence, and utilize available and unused capacity.  Application of such operational policies is evolving into the notion of "managed lanes."  A managed lane is typically a "freeway-within-a-freeway" where a set of lanes within the freeway cross section is separated from the general-purpose lanes.

This 2 PDH online course is intended for civil, highway and transportation engineers involved in transportation planning, design and implementation.

This online engineering PDH course describes the findings of the team and presents its recommendations for U.S. practice. This course contains material that should be required knowledge for anyone concerned with pedestrian and bicyclist issues in the U.S.

Pedestrian and bicyclist deaths accounted for 14 percent of U.S. highway fatalities; for example, 14% in 2008.  As a result, the FHWA's Office of Safety established pedestrian and bicyclist safety as one of its top priorities, and the FHWA, together with several agencies, sent a team of twelve U.S. pedestrian and bicyclist specialists to Europe to study European approaches to pedestrian and bicyclist safety and mobility. The countries visited (Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom) were chosen because of their innovative approaches to non-motorized transportation, as well as the potential transferability of their policies and practices.

This 5 PDH online course is intended primarily for traffic engineers interested in improving pedestrian and bicyclist safety and mobility.