With infrastructure aging while traffic volumes grow, agencies are continually pressed to upgrade roadway infrastructure. Unfortunately, transportation funding has not kept up with inflation or the cost of construction materials, and while most people recognize this problem, our nation hasn’t yet found the willpower to change course.

This situation leads to a constant need to design and construct more with less money. To accomplish this, engineers and designers need to think outside the box. Agencies will need to be flexible and willing to accept new ideas and solutions that meet public safety standards and design functionality while also saving money and reducing site impacts over traditional design solutions—these are referred to as Practical Solutions.

The key to a Practical Solution is to dig beyond the symptom and identify the particular problem for which you need to find the right solution. It is easy to confuse the symptom for the problem (for instance, long queue lengths at intersections can easily mislead us to think the intersection needs more approach lanes), but to come up with a budget friendly and lower impact solution, you need to identify the real issue. Once the problem has been identified, then you can focus on finding the best solution.

An example of this is a project a colleague of mine worked on recently. The project was a four-lane arterial with 8’ wide shared-use paths on both sides of the road. The road alignment had to traverse a steep slope.

The standard design solution would be to apply the agency’s standard road section with separated pathways at a constant offset from the curb and with a fixed slope from the top of curb, and then design the profile to balance the cuts and fills. This solution would result in the following symptoms:

•          Large cuts on the upslope side of the road
•          Large fills on the down slope side
•          Extensive earthwork
•          High construction cost
•          Clearing of native vegetation in grading limits
•          Extensive surface restoration efforts.

Whereas these were the symptoms, the real problem the design team had to solve was how to deliver the same function and safety of the standard section while minimizing the construction costs and impacts. 

The Practical Solution was found by questioning the need to use the standard road section in this situation. If the shared use paths were allowed to vary in elevation and horizontal distance relative to the curb, then the pathways could be manipulated to reduce construction impacts. In cut sections the path was designed to be higher than curb, and in fill sections it was designed to be lower than the curb. By changing these simple parameters of the standard section, the total earthwork quantities, construction impacts, and associated construction costs were significantly reduced, while the function and safety was preserved.

As you can see, practical solutions can be as simple as allowing sidewalks to change alignment and profile relative to the adjacent road--or it could be as complex as replacing a problem intersection with a roundabout. Either way, finding the Practical Solution starts with getting to the core of the problem and then considering creative solutions. Not all creative, out of the box solutions will work, but by entertaining them, you can arrive at the Practical Solution.

How do you differentiate between problem and symptom? Has your agency implemented the Practical Solutions methodology? I would love to hear about it.

Photo credit: canstockphoto.com / 72soul