It has been fourteen years since the Roadway Management Conference (RMC) was held in West Virginia and the 210 or so attendees praised the three-day event that benefited from great fall weather, a wide array of technical speakers, outdoor demonstrations, and lots of in-person social networking.
The Mid-Atlantic Region (PA, WV, MD, VA, DE) was in Wheeling, West Virginia October 11-13 with this year’s RMC. In recent years, the annual conference, optimized to operations and maintenance personnel, was held in Gettysburg, PA, Ellicott City, MD, and Rehoboth Beach, DE. Our plans for Charlottesville in 2020 had to go virtual at the last minute because of that bug that was going around and the Virginia LTAP Center switched gears on a dime to lead a great success. In Wheeling, it was again a great success, or so we heard from many attendees that praised our collective efforts throughout the conference (and we have received some constructive feedback from the evaluations to aid in planning for the next couple of years).
Our three-day conference was attended this time by 210-ish folks from each of the five region states and a handful from farther away. As usual, we had a diverse array of technical and other speakers dealing with pavement management, pipe rehabilitation, inspection, winter maintenance, e-ticketing, stormwater, electric vehicles, a bunch of management and personnel topics, and a series of safety elements.
Our general sessions and our breakout sessions drew from a collection of subject matter experts across the region…and even beyond. If you missed the conference or were there and had to choose between breakouts, you can find a copy of slides for many of our speakers at the 2022 website; find them under Agenda and click on Handout.
We even experimented with what we chose to call “deminars,” where a vendor that wasn’t in a position to demonstrate something put on a short seminar of their product line or expertise concurrent with the outside demonstration period. It was a nice try and we have some work to do on the concept.
Another cornerstone of the RMC is our demonstrations and this year we got to see load securement, snowplow safety, pothole patching, unmanned aerial vehicles, mastic, painted plow blades, equipment blind spot safety, the Federal Highway Administration’s mobile concrete laboratory, and pavement retroreflectivity. We were able to film some of the demonstrations and they are making their way onto the Delaware T2 Center’s YouTube channel. More will follow so feel free to subscribe to see more in the coming weeks. 
The Oglebay Resort in Wheeling was a beautiful location for the RMC, just as the fall leaf changes were occurring, along with literally herds of deer that would just walk right past you.
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