Congratulations to the Cornell Local Roads Program, which was recently awarded a 2013 Roadway Safety Award by the U.S. Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration and the Roadway Safety Foundation.
The National Roadway Safety Awards is a biennial competition that aims to recognize achievements in roadway safety that reduce deaths and serious injuries on our nation’s roads. The Local Roads Program was honored in the Operational Improvements category for its work developing an inexpensive inspection kit (pictured) that enables local road crews to more quickly and easily test the reflectivity of rural road signs, ensuring that they are clearly visible at night. Created in collaboration with Cornell Civil Engineering students and three county highway departments in western N.Y., the kit also significantly reduces the labor and expense to local governments of meeting new retroreflectivity standards for road signage. For example, sign technicians using the kits were able to complete a recent inspection of all the road signs in Wyoming County, N.Y. in only three nights.
A total of 50 of the kits were created as part of the project, at a cost of less than $50 each. The three participating counties each received 10 of the kits, with the remainder distributed to other New York county highway departments. A tip sheet and video for making the components of the kit were also produced and posted online.
News of this honor comes at an exciting and important time for the Cornell Local Roads Program, which provides training and technical assistance to highway and public works officials throughout New York. CALS and the College of Engineering at Cornell recently announced plans for a new shared oversight partnership that aims to combine CALS’ excellence in extension and experience administering the program, with ENG’s technical expertise in civil and environmental engineering. In the new plan, Dr. David Orr, senior engineer in CALS’ Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering, would assume daily supervision and management of the program, while faculty from the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering would lead an advisory committee and provide technical oversight. This structure will be reflected in the next application for a five-year contract for the federally-mandated, state-supported program, one of 58 Local Technical Assistance Program (LTAP) Centers across the country. If renewed, this new path forward will secure the future of the Local Roads Program at Cornell, ensuring that it continues to deliver critical and potentially life-saving roadway expertise to New York communities.
