 The Iowa Department of Transportation has a rich history of working on transportation research that makes a difference. Four key areas we have been striving for research are in pavements, safety, bridges and structures, and winter maintenance. This video shows four projects in those key areas from this last year. By working with our partners in industry, universities, other states and agencies, we have transportation research that will make a difference to the traveling public and will lead to a safer, more efficient and long-lasting transportation system. Transportation agencies are under increased pressure to minimize lane closures during peak hours of the day while reconstructing pavements during off-peak hours. The bump at the end of the bridge is a common problem in Iowa that requires the dedication of considerable maintenance resources. Recent research in Iowa is trying to address both of those problems through the construction of precast bridge approach pavement. Precast pavement can be placed in lane closures in as little as five hours and can be opened to the public almost immediately after placement, thereby reducing the risk to workers and the traveling public. Although there is a added cost with precast pavements, the increased benefits to the traveling public can greatly outweigh situations where there is high traffic. Iowa is very fortunate to be a part of the research project with Mr. Dan McGehee and the University of Iowa on the research that he's doing for young drivers. This type of research will give us an insight into the behaviors that young drivers have on a daily basis in the different type of situations that they actually can see in the urban or rural type of driving that they do here in Iowa. This research will also give us an insight in the type of highway safety issues that we should be looking for, not only to give to our drivers educators so they know what type of training a young driver needs, but also to the parents so they know what to work on with the young drivers and what type of things they should teach them as they're driving and to be aware of. This also will give us a definite insight into what a young driver goes through as far as distractions when they have passengers, all those types of things that we need to use in making safety decisions on what type of restrictions and rules we should have for the Iowa young drivers. It's very important that we work with the young drivers and the drivers educators to try to stop any type of a major crash that would happen before it happens. We want to certainly get the message out there so that everyone's aware of what they can do before a major incident would actually happen. One research project we've been working on the last two, three years has been a multiple blade plow. The idea behind the multiple blade plow is to remove as much snow from the roadway as we possibly can with each pass of the plow. The plow itself would consist of the front carbide blade, which is typical on all of our plows in the state, but would also add to that plow a scarifying blade, which is used on working with ice pack and snow pack type situations. So it helps break up that bond between the snow and ice in the roadway surface. Then following that is a squeegee blade or a rubber blade that helps remove slush and any leftover snow and ice from the roadway. The combination or any one of those can be used individually or they can be used in combination to remove the snow and ice from the roadway. So we think that this is going to help us save a lot of materials in snow and ice operations because the blades will help remove as much snow as possible off the surface of the roadway and allow us to use less salt on our roadways. Signature of bridge like the one behind us require the state of the art technology to monitor quality during construction and make sure there's no over stress conditions. We place sensors in critical locations in the bridge components while it was being constructed and actually monitored forces. When we received the force data, we told the contractor what the magnitudes were and the contractor was able to make changes in the process to ensure that the bridge was constructed properly. Bridges usually are designed and analyzed using theory. That's fine for brand new bridges, but after 10 or 20 years, you really need to get the true behavior of bridges. Structure house monitoring using sensors can give you that. After the I-35 incident in Minneapolis, we felt there's a need to examine the condition and capacity of bridges of similar type like the one you're looking at behind us. So we worked with our state university to come up with monitoring system to examine the capacity and load distribution within the bridge. We place sensors throughout the bridge to major forces when heavily loaded trucks travel across. The force information was given to the IODOT bridge engineers who were able to do a more accurate safe capacity assessment. This close examination allowed us to keep the bridge open without reducing the weight limit. Thank you for watching. If you have any questions about these four projects or any of the other transportation research we are conducting, you can contact me here at the Iowa Department of Transportation.