Crosscutting Recommendations

Across the R&T evaluations, three overarching recommendations emerged from the challenges and best practices discovered by the programs being evaluated. These recommendations might serve to inform future FHWA R&T efforts.

• Improve protocols for internal dissemination to ensure Division Office and State transportation department staff are aware of research progress and can share accurate and uniform information with potential deployers. This recommendation stems from findings across several evaluations. For example, an industry consultant interviewed for the Adaptive Signal Control (ASC) evaluation noted a lack of communication with Division Offices that hindered the use of the systems engineering document. Evaluators for the Roadside Revegetation effort found that some FHWA Division Office and State transportation department staff are not aware of the program. Potential deployers received mixed messages about the GRS-IBS because of professional differences between geotechnical and hydrologic engineers at FHWA, likely hampering rollout of the technology. Communities of practice, while helpful, provide only a forum for discussion, not a protocol for resolving disagreements. Conflict resolution and negotiation strategies, such as joint fact-finding, may enable individuals with different professional training to work out engineering and policy disagreements. Management might want to implement procedures that keep such disagreements from public view or communicate their content constructively.
  
  
• Further incorporate evaluation into the research process by routinely collecting and analyzing data on research use. Research use takes many forms: requests for information through email or phone, citation of FHWA reports in follow-up studies, and adoption of methods after a formal training. Staff in FHWA’s Public Relations Office might track information requests made through their office in a researcher-accessible format (e.g., Excel), including requests from the media and government officials. These requests are an estimate of demand for FHWA research and potential avenues to increasing dissemination and impact. Evaluators for the NHTS, for example, found that more effort is needed to track usage by Federal, State, and local government as well as the media to inform future evaluations of the program. Project leaders and staff should also track information requests they receive directly from potential deployers. In addition, analyzing citations of FHWA publications would be easier if Transport Research International Documentation and Transportation Research Board publications were again tracked by Thomson Reuters’s Web of Science.⁽⁸⁾ Finally, evaluators for several programs, including the subjects of two in-progress evaluations—Traffic Incident Management (TIM) and Managing Risk—found that improved tracking of attendees at trainings and demonstrations would permit better evaluations of the relationship between outreach and adoption.
  
  
• Explore collaborative research management arrangements, including expert advisory panels and stakeholder feedback. The first option enables recognized external experts to inform FHWA decisionmaking. Their involvement adds not only knowledge, but also credibility—necessary especially on high profile or controversial research. A National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) panel helped oversee the Gusset Plates project for example,¹ and NHTS convened an expert panel to provide input to the 2016 survey. The second option, stakeholder feedback, enables potential users of new technologies to inform development, increasing the chances of adoption. For example, the NHTS user community provides NHTS staff with extensive feedback.

¹ This particular method of feedback is likely not desirable in future efforts because of the specific legal structure associated with NCHRP, but project participants indicated that the feedback received was helpful for the project.