WASHINGTON, D.C. — The spotlight theme for TRB’s 91st Annual Meeting is Transportation: Putting Innovation and People to Work. Spotlight sessions, workshops, and discussions at the 2012 TRB Annual Meeting will highlight how research leads to innovation in transportation services and products, and how this in turn can stimulate the economy, create jobs, and attract students to the transportation profession.

 SEATTLE — Kiewit-General-Manson, A Joint Venture, submitted the apparent best combination of bid price and technical proposal for replacing the aging and vulnerable State Route 520 floating bridge, according to tallies calculated by the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT). Kiewit-General-Manson’s bid price of $586.5 million for construction of a new, six-lane floating bridge is $163.5 million less than the upset price of $750 million included in the request for proposals.

  COLLEGE PARK, MD. — Millions of U.S. drivers cross faulty or obsolete bridges every day, highway statistics show, but it's too costly to fix all these spans or adequately monitor their safety, said a University of Maryland researcher who's developed a new, affordable early warning system. This wireless technology could avert the kind of bridge collapse that killed 13 and injured 145 along Minneapolis' I-35W on Aug. 1, 2007, he said — and do so at one-one-hundredth the cost of current wired systems.

 WEST LAFAYETTE, IND. — A civil engineer at Purdue University is taking advantage of the demolition of a bridge spanning the Ohio River to learn more about how bridges collapse in efforts to reduce the annual cost of inspecting large spans. "There is a whole family of bridges called fracture-critical," said Robert J. Connor, an associate professor of civil engineering. "This means that if an important tension member breaks, it's thought the bridge will fall down." However, modern analysis techniques could be used to learn whether such bridges really are fracture-critical, or whether other structural elements would share the load if a major piece failed.

 DENVER — CH2M HILL recently received two Idaho Transportation Department Excellence in Transportation Awards for the East ParkCenter River Crossing Project. The two awards — recognizing outstanding initiatives in developing, planning, and implementing transportation projects throughout Idaho — were received in the Large Design and Construction categories.