Course Description
TTE4804 is the highway design course in a Florida civil engineering degree. The Statewide Course Numbering System titles it Highway Geometric Design and defines it as "principles and procedures for the geometric design of highways and streets; consideration of traffic, land use and aesthetic factors." Its statewide prerequisites are a soil mechanics course and the introductory transportation course.
Five Florida public universities carry it, all at 3 credits — one of the better-adopted upper-division transportation numbers in the state:
| Institution | Its title | Credits |
|---|
| Florida A&M University | Highway Geometric Design | 3 |
| Florida International University | Geometric Design of Highways | 3 |
| Florida Polytechnic University | Highway Engineering and Design | 3 |
| Florida State University | Highway Geometric Design | 3 |
| University of West Florida | Highway Engineering Design | 3 |
Geometric design is the discipline of fitting a road to the ground and to the people who will drive it. Every curve, grade and sight line is computed from an assumed design speed and an assumed driver — their reaction time, their eye height, their tolerance for lateral acceleration. ⚠ That is the intellectual core of the subject and it is unusual in engineering: the governing constraint is not a material property but a model of human behaviour, and the design standards encode decades of accumulated judgement about how much margin that model requires.
Learning Outcomes
Required Outcomes
- Explain the functional classification of highways and how classification determines design criteria.
- Select a design speed and explain the consequences that follow from it throughout the design.
- Apply driver, vehicle and roadway characteristics — perception-reaction time, design vehicles and their turning paths, pavement friction.
- Compute sight distance: stopping, decision, passing and intersection sight distance, and check a design against each.
- Design horizontal alignment: simple and compound circular curves, superelevation and its runoff, side friction, minimum radius, spiral transitions.
- Design vertical alignment: crest and sag vertical curves, K values, grades, and the sight distance controls that govern curve length.
- Coordinate horizontal and vertical alignment so the combination is safe and legible to a driver.
- Design the cross-section: lane and shoulder widths, cross slope, side slopes, clear zone, medians, curbs and drainage elements.
- Compute earthwork: cross-sections, end areas, mass haul, cut and fill balance.
- Design at-grade intersections, including turning lanes, channelisation and sight triangles; describe roundabout and interchange configurations.
- Apply AASHTO design policy and, in this state, the FDOT Design Manual, and locate a governing criterion in either.
- Address roadside safety: clear zone, barrier warrants, and the forgiving-roadside principle.
- Produce and read a plan-and-profile drawing set.
Optional Outcomes
- Use civil design software (Civil 3D, OpenRoads) to model a corridor.
- Design pavement structure, flexible and rigid — ⚠ substantive where the course is titled "Highway Engineering" rather than "Geometric Design".
- Apply traffic analysis and capacity methods to a design.
- Design for pedestrians, cyclists and transit, and apply complete-streets principles.
- Apply access management and corridor preservation.
- Conduct a design exception analysis and document it.
- Complete a full corridor design project with drawings and quantities.
Major Topics
Required Topics
- Design controls — functional classification, design speed, design vehicle, traffic volumes and the design hour, terrain.
- Driver and vehicle characteristics — perception-reaction, acceleration and braking, turning paths, eye and object heights.
- Sight distance — stopping, passing, decision and intersection sight distance; the effect of grade.
- Horizontal alignment — circular curve geometry and stationing, superelevation theory and runoff, side friction factors, minimum radius, spirals, curve widening.
- Vertical alignment — grades and their limits, crest and sag curves, K values, curve length controls including headlight and comfort criteria.
- Cross-section elements — lanes, shoulders, cross slope, side slopes, ditches, medians, clear zone.
- Earthwork — cross-sections, average end area, mass diagram, haul and balance.
- Intersections — at-grade layout, turning lanes, channelisation, sight triangles, roundabouts; an introduction to interchanges.
- Design standards — the AASHTO Green Book, the FDOT Design Manual, and how a design exception is justified.
- Roadside safety — clear zone, barriers and end treatments, breakaway hardware.
- Plans production — plan and profile, typical sections, and the conventions of a highway drawing set.
Optional Topics
- Pavement design, flexible and rigid.
- Corridor modelling in Civil 3D or OpenRoads.
- Traffic operations and capacity analysis.
- Multimodal and complete-streets design.
- Drainage and hydraulic design of roadway features.
- Construction staging and maintenance of traffic.
- Cost estimating and quantities.
Resources & Tools
- ⚠ AASHTO, A Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets — "the Green Book" — is the governing document of this subject, and the course is largely an education in using it. Learning to find a criterion in it quickly is an assessed and directly employable skill.
- ⚠ In Florida the controlling document is the FDOT Design Manual, which adopts and amends AASHTO policy. A design on a Florida state road is checked against FDOT, not against the Green Book alone, and FDOT criteria are in places more restrictive. Both are the real references; the textbook is the explanation.
- Traffic and Highway Engineering by Garber and Hoel is the standard text and covers both the geometric and the traffic material.
- Principles of Highway Engineering and Traffic Analysis by Mannering and Washburn is the common alternative.
- The MUTCD (Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices) for signs, markings and signals, and the Roadside Design Guide (AASHTO) for the safety material.
- Software: Autodesk Civil 3D and Bentley OpenRoads are the industry tools, and student licences are free for both. ⚠ Civil 3D competence is one of the most immediately marketable skills a transportation graduate can have — consultancies hire for it explicitly.
- Professional body: the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE), with an active Florida section and student chapters.
Career Pathways
- Civil Engineer (SOC 17-2051) and Transportation Engineer — the direct destination.
- Traffic Engineer — operations and safety analysis, closely adjacent.
- Civil Engineering Technician (SOC 17-3022) — design and drafting support roles.
- Construction Manager (SOC 11-9021) — roadway construction, where reading these plans is the job.
- ⚠ Florida is one of the strongest transportation engineering markets in the United States, and for a simple reason: sustained population growth in a state whose geography forces most travel onto a limited number of corridors. The employers are large and identifiable — the Florida Department of Transportation and its seven districts, the expressway authorities (Central Florida, Miami-Dade, Tampa-Hillsborough), Florida's Turnpike Enterprise, county and municipal public works departments, and the consultancies that do most of the actual design: Kimley-Horn, HNTB, Jacobs, AECOM, HDR, Metric Engineering, RS&H.
- ⚠ FDOT's consultant prequalification system shapes the market: firms must be prequalified in specific work types to bid on state work, which makes FDOT-standard design experience valuable in a way that generalises poorly across state lines but is highly portable within Florida.
Special Information
Offering Notes — offerings and hours, school by school
| Institution | Its title | Credits | Contact hours |
|---|
| Florida A&M University | Highway Geometric Design | 3 | not published |
| Florida International University | Geometric Design of Highways | 3 | not published |
| Florida Polytechnic University | Highway Engineering and Design | 3 | not published |
| Florida State University | Highway Geometric Design | 3 | not published |
| University of West Florida | Highway Engineering Design | 3 | not published |
All five are State University System institutions, so statewide numbering guarantees transfer between them. ✅ All five carry it at 3 credits — no credit divergence, which is worth stating because it is not the norm in this inventory.
⚠ The 45 contact hours at the top of this guide are derived — the Florida convention for a 3-credit lecture course. No institution publishes an hour figure.
⚠ "Geometric Design" or "Highway Engineering" — a scope signal worth reading
Three institutions name geometric design specifically, matching the statewide title. Florida Polytechnic and the University of West Florida both use "Highway Engineering", which is a broader term.
Geometric design is one component of highway engineering; the others are pavement design, drainage, materials and traffic operations. A course titled "Highway Engineering and Design" may well cover pavement structure and materials alongside the alignment work — which is more breadth in the same three credits, and therefore less depth in each.
⚠ The practical consequence: if your programme expects you to have covered pavement design elsewhere, a broader course duplicates it; if it does not, a narrow geometric course leaves a gap. Check your own syllabus against your degree plan, and if you are transferring, expect a receiving department to ask what was actually covered rather than reading the title.
The prerequisites, and what they signal
The statewide prerequisites are a soil mechanics course and the introductory transportation course (TTE3004C or TTE3004). ⚠ The soil mechanics requirement is the informative one. A geometric design course does not obviously need soil mechanics — until you reach earthwork, side slopes, cut and fill, and the subgrade the pavement will sit on. It signals that the course treats the road as something built on ground rather than drawn on paper, which is the correct treatment and the one FDOT expects.
Position in the curriculum, the FE exam and licensure
A senior-level course, and in many programmes the transportation capstone or immediately before it.
Transportation engineering is a full content area on the NCEES Fundamentals of Engineering (Civil) examination — geometric design, sight distance, superelevation and earthwork all appear — and it is one of the five depth options on the PE Civil examination. The FE is the first step toward Professional Engineer licensure through the Florida Board of Professional Engineers, which requires four years of qualifying experience before the PE examination. ⚠ Roadway plans are sealed by a licensed engineer and reviewed by FDOT or the local agency, so the standard of care is external, documented and enforced.
Workload
Budget eight to twelve hours a week, more where the course carries a corridor design project. ⚠ The distinctive difficulty is that the calculations are individually easy and collectively unforgiving. A curve length, a superelevation rate and a K value are each a few minutes' work — but they interact, and changing the design speed late in a project propagates through every one of them. Fix the design controls first and resist changing them; that discipline is the professional lesson as much as the academic one.
AI Integration
Highway design is standards-driven, and standards are where these tools are least reliable and most confident — the same pattern as the environmental and steel design courses, with a Florida-specific edge.
Genuinely useful: explaining why a criterion exists — the derivation of the superelevation equation from side friction and lateral acceleration, or why a sag curve is controlled by headlight distance; generating practice problems; checking stationing arithmetic, which is fiddly and error-prone; explaining an unfamiliar term in the Green Book or the FDOT manual; writing spreadsheet routines for curve and earthwork calculations, which is exactly how practitioners work; and drafting report prose.
⚠⚠ Where it fails:
- Design criteria from memory. Minimum radii, K values, superelevation rates, clear zone widths and friction factors are produced plausibly and are frequently wrong or from a superseded edition. ⚠ The Green Book is revised, and criteria change between editions.
- National answers to Florida questions. ⚠ The FDOT Design Manual amends AASHTO policy, and on a Florida state road FDOT governs. A generated criterion will be the national one, and a reviewer will reject the design.
- Silence about which control governs. Vertical curve length is set by whichever of several criteria is longest; generated answers commonly compute one and stop.
- No design exception reasoning. Where a criterion cannot be met, the professional response is a documented design exception — not quietly using a smaller number, which is what a model will produce if pressed.
The standard this course installs: every design value is traced to a criterion in a named document and edition, and the governing control is identified. Cite the clause. That is what an FDOT reviewer checks, what a plans-review comment will ask for, and what an expert witness will look for years later — and it catches every failure above in about a minute.
⚠ One thing worth saying plainly: the margins in this subject exist because people die when they are wrong. Sight distance, clear zone and superelevation are not conservatism for its own sake — they are the accumulated response to crashes that happened. The NSPE Code of Ethics holds public safety paramount, and in highway design that is not an abstraction.
Academic integrity: read your syllabus. Where the course includes a design project, policies commonly distinguish drafting and software use from the design decisions themselves.