Surface transportation

Designing for the correct context of your roadway project is critical to a successful outcome. Our roadway specialists understand how to design for different types of roadway projects — urban, rural, low-speed and high-speed, to name a few — and we closely monitor emerging research and new context classifications. By staying at the forefront of design guideline changes, we can provide you with a design that moves you toward your goals.

Emerging technology

To help you benefit from emerging technologies, we stay on the forefront of developing trends, such as connected and automated vehicles, and how they will affect roadway design. Our experts contribute to the industry through participation on several National Cooperative Highway Research Program panels. Our knowledge and awareness of emerging technologies and the importance of all road users merge with our traditional design know-how to make your vision a reality.

Our goal is to help you provide a roadway that enhances your community’s livability and meets the needs of motorists, vulnerable road users, cyclists and pedestrians, along with public right of way and accessibility guidelines.

Focus on sustainability

We recognize that project sustainability is a key priority for your projects. We helped write the guidelines for the Illinois Livable and Sustainable Transportation Rating System, and we work closely with Hanson’s other disciplines to incorporate sustainable elements into road projects. A good design can accommodate future improvements with minimal to no changes to the design provided today. If we forecast that traffic or truck weights will increase, we can provide a design that easily allows future capacity additions without reconstructing everything. We can also design structures with additional width to provide for future capacity and maintenance without the loss of throughput and capability to handle heavy loads.

Aesthetically pleasing structures without fracture-critical elements provide beauty and safety for residents and users, and we can design structure openings with wildlife crossings and three-sided box culverts equipped with a natural channel bed that reduces environmental impacts. Our team also keeps sustainability front of mind by considering future drainage updates in our designs to reduce construction and disruption during later projects.