Research needs in transportation facilities: guideway technology and materials research: Fid-Bau Portal

Research needs in transportation facilities: guideway technology and materials research

Moavenzadeh, Fred

Abstract The need to rehabilitate our national infrastructure in emerging as the dominant market situation surrounding transportation facilities today. However, current programs in, and proposals for, transportation research have not explored the issues surrounding the needed national commitment on a scale commensurate with the magnitude of the renewal market. As a result, the national research agenda in transportation facilities seems to be aimed at only an incremental advance in the state of the art. The growing requirements for infrastructure renewal are driven by both increasing demand for transportation and reduced supply due to deterioration and depletion. While current techniques and practices to rehabilitate existing facilities have been derived largely from those of new construction, the markets for the two types of activity and the types of work involved are different in some important respects, including project scale, technology, management and financing. As annual rehabilitation expenditures increase, issues of productivity and cost of rehabilitation will become increasingly important, and the need for research that recognizes the special constraints associated with rehabilitation will become more evident. A fortuitous confluence of market and technology trends currently exists for a series of technological breakthroughs in the guideway construction industry through the remainder of this century. New technologies in computers, automated systems and exotic materials have been developed to the point where they are ready to be exploited commercially in transportation construction. Recent developments in transport facility finance and management also have important implications for infrastructure renewal. At the same time, the emerging infrastructural renewal market is sufficiently large, dispersed and diverse to guarantee not only significant payoffs for private industry research and development, but also spinoffs to improve the construction industry's productivity in other markets as well. A creative response to the infrastructure problem should therefore focus on improvements in the productivity of rehabilitation activities through major advances in technology and management that result in more durable, more reliable and cheaper repairs, so that the available resources could produce the needed output. This will require major commitments to research, both to develop or adapt the novel technology to the field of interest, and to assess the implications of that technology or the resulting gains in productivity on industry operations and costs.