The Federal Highway Administration has awarded a total of $8.8 million to eight states and the District of Columbia for demonstration projects that propose to use state-of-the-art technologies for highway and bridge infrastructure durability, safety and asset management. The awards, announced Aug. 22, went to 10 projects and come from FHWA’s Accelerated Innovation Deployment Demonstration program, known as AID…

Dr. Chris Hendrickson, an emeritus professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, said via email, “Pursuing innovation is essential to make transportation more cost-effective and efficient.”

Hendrickson added that the AID program “is critical funding to incentivize and reinforce a new innovation culture in state DOTs.”

He also said that besides the FHWA program, State Transportation Innovation Councils are promoting advances in the field,

For example, Hendrickson noted that the council in Pennsylvania “has enabled a fast track for scaling innovations identified by state employees, industry and academia.”