Editorial Standards and Corrections
How articles here get sourced, checked and corrected.
Where the facts come from
Every article starts from the documents an agency or researcher published: federal tables, state design manuals, audit reports, Transportation Research Board studies, AASHTO specifications and peer-reviewed papers. A study gets cited only after someone here has read it. Secondhand summaries, press roundups and figures with no traceable origin stay out.
Each source gets named in the sentence that relies on it and listed again at the end of the article. A reader should never have to guess which report backs which claim.
Numbers and uncertainty
Figures appear with the year and the body that produced them. Federal numbers shift between editions, and a cost without a year tells a reader very little. When a figure could not be confirmed, the article says so, gives the range it found and names the office most likely to hold the real answer.
Agencies move and renumber their documents often, so citations record titles and report numbers along with links. If a link breaks, the title should still lead to the document.
Voice
Articles run under the publication's name and describe what engineers, contractors and agencies do. Sustainable Highways does not design, build or inspect roads, and the writing never suggests otherwise.
Corrections
Corrections are welcome. Write to contact@sustainablehighways.org with the page, the sentence in question and, if you have it, the document that shows the error. Mistakes in a figure, a date, a standard number or a regulatory citation all count.
A confirmed error gets fixed in place, with a note in the text when the fix changes the argument. A different reading of the same evidence gets a different treatment: if it holds up, the article adds it next to its own reading rather than swapping one for the other. Both kinds of message go through the contact page.