Traffic and Highway Engineering

The new edition of Garber and Hoel's best-selling text focuses on giving students insight into all facets of traffic and highway engineering. Students generally come to this course with little knowledge or understanding of the importance of transportation, much less of the extensive career opportunities within the field. Transportation is an extremely broad field, and courses must either cover all transportation modes or focus on specifics. While many topics can be covered with a survey approach, this often lacks sufficient depth and students leave the course without a full understanding of any of the fields. This text focuses exclusively on traffic and highway engineering beginning with a discussion of the pivotal role transportation plays in our society, including employment opportunities, historical impact, and the impact of transportation on our daily lives. This approach gives students a sense of what the field is about as well as an opportunity to consider some of its challenges. Later chapters focus on specific issues facing transportation engineers. The text uses pedagogical tools such as worked problems, diagrams and tables, reference material, and realistic examples to demonstrate how the material is applied.

Nicholas J. Garber is a Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Virginia where he has been a member of the faculty since September of 1980. Before joining the University of Virginia, Dr. Garber was a Professor of Civil Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Sierra Leone, where he was also the Dean of the Faculty of Engineering. At the State University of New York at Buffalo, he played an important role in the development of the graduate program in Transportation Engineering. For several years, he was a design engineer for consulting engineering firms in London, and also worked as an Area Engineer and Assistant Resident Engineer in Sierra Leone.

Lester A. Hoel is the L.A. Lacy Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Engineering and the Director of the Center for Transportation Studies at the University of Virginia. He held the Hamilton Professorship in Civil Engineering from 1974-99. From 1974-89 he was Chairman of the Department of Civil Engineering. Previously he was Professor of Civil Engineering and Associate Director, Transportation Research Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and on the faculty at San Diego State University. He also was principal engineer with Wilbur Smith and Associates and visiting professor at the Norwegian Technical University and the University of California at Irvine and a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley.