Strategies for Planned Project Acceleration

Abstract

Departments of transportation in the United States are under increasing pressure to accelerate projects to meet user-defined constraints and reduce the inconvenience to the traveling public. Although there is information about acceleration projects in other industries, there has been little specifically aimed at highway projects. A domestic scan sponsored by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program was tasked with providing information in this area. The objective of this paper is to synthesize the resulting information into fundamentals that support successful planned accelerated highway project delivery. Case studies of how departments of transportation successfully accelerated the construction of four very different projects in California, Florida, and Texas serve as the basis for identifying these fundamentals. The fundamentals include upfront and detailed planning, designs that facilitate accelerated construction, a collaborative environment for project stakeholders, and incentives and disincentives to motivate construction contractors.