The Federal Highway Administration (FHwA) recently promulgated additional regulations for public hearings on highway locations and design and for consideration of social, economic, and environmental effects in the development of federal-aid highway projects.¹ These regulations codify earlier policies and procedures contained in Policy and Procedure Memorandum (PPM) 20-8² and Instructional Memorandums (IM) 20-3-72 and 20-4-72.³ The substance of those earlier documents has been brought over into the codification with few changes, although the highway department has been informally soliciting comments for a wholesale revision.

Promulgation of highway regulations has traditionally been a rare event. In an earlier ELR article,⁴ Ronald Peterson and Robert Kennan reviewed existing FHwA procedures and found them "incomplete, outdated and virtually inaccessible." At that time, only eight pages of FHwA procedures had been published as formal regulations. Since the publication of that article, FHwA has begun a process of reviewing all their operating procedures to determine which of them should be promulgated formally and published in the Federal Register. FHwA also plans to publish a manual of those internal procedures not viewed as appropriate for formal promulgation. The recent codification, the new Part 790, is the first amendment to result from the review process.