Professor Khaled Ksaibati and engineering student Kristan Debler conduct gradation testing on aggregate from a gravel road in Teton County.
What does the University of Wyoming have to do with a small dirt road on the opposite side of the state, or the variable speed limits on Interstate 80, or the bridge repair in your local town? You may be surprised to learn that wherever you drive in Wyoming, you’re likely to encounter roadways, bridges and work zones that are safer and more efficient thanks to the Wyoming Technology Transfer Center, which is sponsored by the Federal Highway Administration in cooperation with UW, the Wyoming Department of Transportation (WYDOT), and Wyoming cities and counties.
The center is housed within UW’s College of Engineering and Applied Science. “The Wyoming Technology Transfer Center has been in existence for over 20 years,” says Director Khaled Ksaibati. He explains that partnerships are key to the center’s success: “We have to all work together at the different levels—the federal, the state, the local and the university because of the technology we have at the university. By all working together, we can come up with the most efficient transportation system.”
“The Wyoming Department of Transportation and UW’s Technology Transfer Center have enjoyed a longstanding working relationship,” says Gregg Fredrick, WYDOT chief engineer for engineering and planning. “Completed research, engineering studies and training continue to be effectively implemented in many of the local transportation agencies across the state. This synergy, fostered by Professor Ksaibati, has a positive effect on the safety of the local roadways. It provides local agencies access to highway technology and engineering knowledge that assists in the maintenance of their transportation infrastructure and enhances the local agencies’ expertise.”
Like many Wyoming counties, Sweetwater County has used the center to learn about dust control on county dirt roads, sign reflectivity compliance, speed limits, certifications and asset management for paved roads.
“Sweetwater County is very fortunate to have the Wyoming Technology Transfer Center available as a resource for many reasons,” says Sweetwater County Public Works Director John Radosevich. “The center provides a service to the state that is valuable to all residents in one way or another. The knowledge that is provided allows counties to make wise decisions in regard to transportation issues.”
“The main objective of the center is to do technology transfer for the transportation community in the state,” Ksaibati says. “We do lots of trainings around the state, and attendees include people from consulting agencies, contractors, WYDOT personnel, as well as road and bridge departments from cities, towns and counties. We want to make sure that our partners in the state are aware of the latest technology and that we help them through the implementation of that technology.”
Radosevich speaks to the center’s willingness to help in whatever local partners need. “Various organizations such as the Wyoming Association of County Engineers and Road Superintendents provide input and requests to the center in regard to topics needing further study, training opportunities needed for regulation compliance, data needed to substantiate requests for additional funding and information on new technology. These requests are processed by the center, and results translated back to the counties. If additional training workshops are required, the center provides them to all agencies and individuals requesting them.”
Improving safety is one of the Wyoming Technology Transfer Center’s main goals. Fredrick says that the Wyoming Rural Road Safety Program is one great example of this. “WYDOT has contracted with the center to assist counties in evaluating the safety of the county roadways, to develop a strategy to correct the safety deficiencies at high-risk locations, and to assure that the project proposals meet the federal and state requirements for federal funding,” he says. “Cost-effective improvements are selected and funded, and these often consist of installing curve warning signs, guardrail, pavement markings, roadside delineation and others.”
One study the center has underway with the Wyoming Transportation Safety Coalition and WYDOT involves looking at truck crashes in recent years on some of the state’s main highways, including I-80, I-25, I-90, WY-59, US-30 and US-26. “We are also looking at the citations that the Wyoming Highway Patrol issues on those highly traveled roadways,” Ksaibati says. “We are trying to correlate citations to crashes. The objective would be to help the Wyoming Highway Patrol in identifying hot spots on our highway system where additional enforcement might help in reducing crashes. It’s very well known that safety is impacted by the three E’s: engineering, enforcement and education. In this research study, we’re concentrating on the three E’s to reduce truck-related crashes around the state.”
Another example of the center’s work to improve safety involves speed limit standards. Several years ago, there were no standards for setting speed limits on local roads. “By working with our local partners and WYDOT, we developed a speed-limit program for local roads,” Ksaibati says. “Now, we have a systematic process, so whether a person is driving in Laramie County or in Fremont County, their expectations can be the same. This is extremely effective and good for the driving public.”
“We do lots of research studies, and the beneficiaries of those research studies are the driving public of Wyoming,” Ksaibati says, adding that the majority of the funding for those studies comes from WYDOT.
One of those studies focuses on dust mitigation on Wyoming’s dirt roads. “In this study, we are collecting dust measurements,” Ksaibati says. “WYDOT allocates funding for chemicals to reduce the dust on unpaved roadways, then we do the studies to determine the effectiveness of that program.”
Occasionally the Wyoming Legislature will also request a study so that lawmakers have the information needed to allocate future transportation infrastructure funding.
For example, the center recently studied the state’s paved country roads and helped develop a management system in cooperation with Wyoming counties, the Wyoming County Commissioners Association, WYDOT and the Federal Highway Administration.
“We have about 2,400 miles of county roads,” Ksaibati says. “Some were built well over 40 years ago, and we never really allocated the proper resources to maintain them and upgrade them to the appropriate level.
“Such a management system will be extremely beneficial in establishing funding needs for local paved roads so that they can service the driving public as well as industrial or energy traffic,” he says.
“You can see that it’s a team effort to identify the needs, document the needs, work with the politicians and provide them with the appropriate data so that we can maintain our transportation infrastructure.”
From less dust to fewer crashes and everything in between, the federal-state-county-university partnership has created safer, more efficient roadways for all who live and pass through Wyoming.
