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About

Welcome to Pavement Interactive. This website is an information resource for the pavement community. It provides a ready reference on common paving topics, the ability to look up typical methods and practices, and links to additional resources. The following subsections describe the target audience and intended function of Pavement Interactive.

Target Audience

In a broad sense, Pavement Interactive is motivated by the desire to assist those both inside and outside the pavement community including contractors, government agencies, private consultants as well as future industry members. As a result, it is applicable to a broad range of potential users including engineers, architects, technicians, equipment operators, inspectors, managers, college/vocational students and, of course, the general public.

Function

The purpose of Pavement Interactive is to create a knowledge base and help users educate themselves about pavement topics. In particular, it can help users learn about pavements in two ways:

  • By providing a multimedia, interactive reference that will benefit those who want information on pavements.
  • By providing a self-directed learning tool on pavements. Articles are arranged in logical order so a user could read through them as they might in a text or short course.

Pavement Reference

Pavement Interactive is an extensive pavement reference. Users can browse or use the search tool to look up typical values, methods, practices and resources. It can also be used to assemble multimedia pavement presentations or lectures through simple cut-and-paste of text, pictures, videos and animation.

Self-Directed Learning Tool

Pavement Interactive can also be used as a self-directed learning tool. The term “self-directed learning” refers to learning and teaching methods that rely on the direction and guidance of the learner such as distance learning, and learning from computers or video. As a learning tool, Pavement Interactive is designed to provide you with:

  1. A broad and well-rounded introduction to pavement in the areas of pavement types, materials, design considerations, mix design, structural design, construction, quality assurance, specifications, evaluation, maintenance and rehabilitation, and pavement management.
  2. The option to explore in-depth information where applicable. This is done by the use of detailed technical information and specific content generated by members of the Pavement Tools Consortium (see History and credits, below).
  3. The option to investigate other sources of information on the Web or in print form through the use of extensive references.

After covering a pavement concept in Pavement Interactive, you should, in general, be able to:

  • Describe the pavement concept covered
  • Describe the importance of this concept
  • Describe when this concept applies
  • Describe the typical equipment, methods and procedures used
  • Discuss and interpret typical measurement values encountered
  • Apply this concept in actual practice

History and credits

Pavement Interactive grew out of a pavement reference that Joe Mahoney began for the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) in the 1980s. That reference became WSDOT's Pavement Guide Interactive, a CD-ROM for self-directed training, and in 2002 a University of Washington team began moving it to the web.

The Pavement Tools Consortium

From 2004 to 2013 the site was developed through the Pavement Tools Consortium (PTC), a Transportation Pooled Fund project, TPF-5(090), led by WSDOT with the University of Washington as its research partner. The consortium set out to develop and share computer-based pavement tools for training and construction. Alongside Pavement Interactive it produced HMAView, PMSView, Photoview and a media library.

These agencies were members and funded the work:

  • California Department of Transportation (Caltrans)
  • Federal Highway Administration
  • Florida Department of Transportation
  • Idaho Transportation Department
  • Illinois Department of Transportation
  • Kansas Department of Transportation
  • Maryland State Highway Administration
  • Minnesota Department of Transportation
  • Texas Department of Transportation
  • Washington State Department of Transportation

People

At the University of Washington:

  • Joe Mahoney, principal investigator
  • Steve Muench, lead content developer of Pavement Guide Interactive
  • George Turkiyyah, co-developer of Xpactor and EverFE
  • George White, lead developer of Pavement Interactive, HMAView, PMSView and the media library

The consortium would not have started without WSDOT and the Maryland State Highway Administration. Our thanks to Keith Anderson at WSDOT, its original coordinator, and to Linda Pierce and Kim Willoughby at WSDOT and Cathy Nicholas at FHWA, who saw the project through.

Since the consortium

In 2006 Pavia Systems, the first company spun out of the University of Washington's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, licensed the material and went on to edit and publish Pavement Interactive. Today the site is published by HeadLight.