AASHTO-AGC-ARTBA Joint Committee
Subcommittee on New Highway Materials
Task Force 13 Report

A Guide to Standardized Highway Barrier Hardware

ONLINE HARDWARE GUIDE - UPDATES

• Updating Process
• Resources for Submitters
• Systems and Components ready for vote

Updating Process

1. Agencies or individuals submit hardware information for addition to the Guide. (See "Resources for Submitters.")
   • The submitter prepares a drawing and specification conforming to the Guide standards.
   • The submitter requests a hardware designator by email.
   • A representative of AASHTO Task Force 13 assigns a designator to the new hardware and creates a forum for it on the Guide discussion board.
   • The submitter provides a PDF file of the drawing and specification (usually as an email attachment), which is then posted for public viewing and comment.


2. The Task Force 13 members review the submissions and comments and vote on approving additions to the Guide.



3. If Task Force 13 approves a submission for addition to the Guide, it is added to the online Guide and the comments prior to approval are archived. If Task Force 13 votes not to add a submission to the Guide, the submitted material and comments are also archived.

Resources for Submitters

• Standards - The drawing and specification standards are described here. Please review these before preparing drawings and specifications, and make sure your files conform to the standards.



• Designators - Each system and component is assigned a unique designator to categorize and identify it. The designators are described in the system index and component index.



• Discussion board - After your system or component has been assigned a designator, the AASHTO volunteer(s) will create a forum on the Highway Barrier Hardware Guide Discussion Board for the purposes of comment and discussion. We strongly recommend that you join the discussion board as a member (create a username and password). Members can bookmark particular discussion topics and receive email notifications when others reply to those topics. To do so, follow these steps:
  1. Go to the discussion board and login.
  2. Click on the "profile" button at the top of the page to view your member information.
  3. In the profile screen, click on the "Bookmarks" tab. This will show you your current bookmarks.
  4. Click on "Manage Bookmarks" in the top right corner of the bookmark table.
  5. Here you can set a default notification for all new bookmarks. If you have bookmarks already existing, also select the individual bookmarks and set a notification for each.
  6. To bookmark a topic, go to it and click on the bookmark icon in the upper left corner.
  7. Now the discussion board will email you if anyone adds a message to the bookmarked topics. Remember that you still need to occasionally visit the forums for your system(s) and/or component(s) to check if anyone has added a new topic.
  
  
  
• Adobe Acrobat (PDF) - Files created and set-up appropriately in Adobe Acrobat 7.0 can be "marked up" graphically with text editing and other comments. In combination with the discussion board, this can be a very useful tool for reviewers. To enable this capability, you can either print your drawing and specification sheets to PDF and submit them to the Task Force representative for assembly and set-up, or you can create the finished PDF file yourself. To save volunteer time, we recommend the latter approach when possible (i.e., if you have Adobe Acrobat Professional 7.0 or higher).  Print the separate pages to PDF, open them in Adobe Acrobat, modify them and add links as desired, enable "comments with text editing" by selecting "Comments > Enable for Commenting in Adobe Reader," and save the file. For more information about using Adobe Acrobat, visit the Adobe support site.