Top Cover Stories of 2025
From disaster response to safety and construction innovation, Roads & Bridges’ top cover stories of 2025 reflect the pressure and change that North American infrastructure faces.
Readers followed recovery efforts in Western North Carolina after devastating floods, looked at how driver behavior plays a role in road safety, and saw how sensors and new tools are reshaping concrete paving jobsites.
Take a look for yourself.
How Response Crews Restored Western N.C.
One of the top cover stories of 2025 focused on the massive effort to rebuild roads and bridges across Western North Carolina after Hurricane Helene caused widespread flooding and damage.
The storm washed out highways, damaged hundreds of bridges and left major routes closed across the region, but specifically around Asheville, a city of 94,992 people in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
In response, crews from the North Carolina Department of Transportation and partner agencies moved quickly, working around the clock to clear debris, reopen roads, and restore access to hard-hit communities. Emergency contracts and close coordination with utilities helped speed repairs, even as crews faced challenging terrain and ongoing weather issues.
While the recovery is far from finished, the story showed how fast coordination, on-the-ground decision-making and sheer manpower helped stabilize the region and get people moving again after one of the most damaging storms the area has seen.
The Push to Make Safer Roads Starts with Drivers
One of this year’s most talked-about safety stories focused on a simple but uncomfortable truth: safer roads only work if drivers are part of the equation.
Even as traffic deaths have shown signs of slowing, tens of thousands of people are still killed or seriously injured on U.S. roads every year.
The article explains how agencies are rethinking road safety by looking beyond pavement and guardrails and paying closer attention to how people actually drive. That change is already shaping the way safety decisions are made.
In Minnesota, transportation officials are using crash and citation data to predict where serious crashes are most likely. Rather than waiting for patterns to appear after lives are lost, they’re trying to step in sooner.
That shift is already changing how safety decisions get made. When agencies can see exactly where crashes are happening and what’s causing them, they can target education, enforcement, and design fixes instead of spreading resources thin.
Safer roads matter, but they’re not the whole answer. Getting real results also means helping drivers make better choices, using data to focus efforts where they’ll have the biggest impact.
Revolutionizing Concrete Paving
One of our 2025 cover stories looks at how concrete paving jobsites are changing across the country. Instead of waiting days for lab results, crews can now test concrete right on site and see how it’s performing while it’s still curing.
A lot of that change is coming from sensors placed right in the fresh concrete. They show how quickly the pavement is gaining strength, which helps crews know when it’s safe to reopen a road. For drivers, that often means fewer closures and shorter delays.
Some of the latest sensors track concrete strength within days and keep collecting data after the road opens. Other tools watch how the concrete cures and alert crews if it’s drying too fast or too slow, giving them a chance to fix issues early.
At the same time, digital tools and artificial intelligence are starting to support mix design, deliveries and scheduling. While use varies, the goal is the same across projects: less guesswork, fewer delays and concrete pavements built to last.