Benefits of the Minnesota Road Research Project

Abstract

The Minnesota Department of Transportation began construction on the Minnesota Road Research Project (MnROAD) in 1991 and opened the full-scale pavement research facility to live traffic in 1994. Since the time of its construction, MnROAD, the first major test track since the AASHO Road Test of the 1950s and 1960s, has provided many lessons in pavement testing and pavement engineering on behalf of the greater pavement community. Researchers at the University of Minnesota reviewed these lessons from the first phase of MnROAD (the facility's first 10 years of operation) for a project titled MnROAD Lessons Learned. The Lessons Learned project involved more than 50 interviews; 300 published and unpublished reports, papers, and briefs; and an online survey of pavement professionals. This paper, based on the Lessons Learned project, presents a sample of the lasting benefits of MnROAD at the local, state, and national levels. Furthermore, the paper provides extensive references for these benefits in the hope of increasing awareness of this pavement test facility's underpublicized contributions to pavement engineering.