According to the National Research Council (2006), the field of infrastructure development and rehabilitation is one of seven critical categories that require attention of geotechnical researchers and practitioners. Therefore, in this dissertation, two topics related to infrastructure development were selected and studies. These topics were performance of granular shoulders and nondestructive evaluation of low volume road bridge substructures. The first topic investigated common problems associated with granular shoulders, evaluation of several test sections stabilized with selected chemical and mechanical stabilization techniques, laboratory box model, where mechanically stabilized shoulders were tested under cyclic loading, and simple design charts that can help design stable shoulder sections. The second topic evaluates the effectiveness of using nondestructive ultrasonic stress wave tests to determine the internal timber piles conditions and correlate it to capacity of in-service piles. Also, the results of a destructive static load are presented. During this test, the timber piles at one abutment, instrumented with strain gages and load cells, were consecutively damaged to simulate different scenarios of pile deterioration. The influence of this deterioration on the bridge substructure behavior was evaluated.