Road and Highway Engineering

Roadway geometry and the plan set that comes with it. That means horizontal and vertical alignments, typical sections, cross sections, and earthwork quantities. It also means intersection and interchange layouts, drainage coordination, signing and striping plans, traffic control and staging plans, and the quantity takeoffs behind the estimate. On corridor work the scope extends to alternatives analysis, traffic operations modeling, and the exhibits that go into a public submittal. The engineer works on your templates and on your agency's CAD standards, which on DOT work are usually stricter than a private client's. Your engineer of record reviews and seals the submittal, as always. Where the project needs quantities priced as well as measured, the roadway scope pairs with a cost estimator on the same team. That avoids the numbers being rebuilt twice by two different people.

Yes, and to the state DOT manual that sits on top of them, which is usually the document that actually governs. Geometric design follows the AASHTO Green Book and the related policy documents. Traffic control devices follow the MUTCD, published by the Federal Highway Administration. Each state DOT then issues its own design manual, standard drawings, and CAD standards, and those take precedence on its projects. Roadside safety and drainage criteria come out of the same stack. We screen candidates for experience with the specific state DOT your work is filed under. The difference between two state manuals is where most review comments come from, so it is not a detail worth leaving to chance. Accessibility of pedestrian facilities follows the ADA and the public right of way guidelines your agency applies.

AutoCAD Civil 3D, OpenRoads Designer, and MicroStation for design and production. Most state DOTs standardize on one of the two platforms and publish their own configuration for it. Traffic operations work runs in Synchro, HCS, VISSIM, or Sidra, depending on the analysis the agency asks for. Drainage and hydraulics come from HEC-RAS, HY-8, and the DOT's own spreadsheets. Quantities and estimating run in Bluebeam against the agency's bid item structure. The engineers we place adopt your agency's workspace, seed files, level and layer standards, and sheet templates during onboarding. Nobody brings their own configuration to a project that already has one. If your work is split across two DOTs on different platforms, that is a matching requirement rather than a detail to sort out later. Tell us during qualification and we screen for both.

By working inside your submittal calendar rather than around it. The engineer produces to the milestone set your agency uses. That may be preliminary, right of way, a plans specifications and estimate submittal, or a design build package. Review comments come back as a tracked disposition, not as a pile of markups nobody has sorted. Because the engineer works your hours in your time zone, a comment received in the morning is being resolved that afternoon. That matters when the response window is measured in days rather than weeks. Coordination calls, utility conflicts, and constructability reviews all happen live. Your firm holds the relationship with the agency and signs the submittal. An agency that gets a tracked disposition back reads it as a firm that has done this before.

When you have won work whose duration is shorter than the commitment a hire represents. Transportation workloads move with award cycles. A permanent hire made at the top of one carries through the gap that follows, after a recruitment process measured in months. Remote capacity scales with the contract instead. The professional works your hours, and the engagement carries a written replacement if the person is not the right fit. Onboarding for a standard profile takes less than 72 hours once you have selected the candidate, and specialized roles take five to seven business days. It is also how most firms cover a discipline they need occasionally rather than continuously, such as traffic modeling or roadside safety analysis. See how a firm your size structures the first hire before you decide how many you need.