01587557

Component

Although collisions of over-height vehicles or vehicles carrying over-height loads with a bridge superstructure may be considered a rare event, occurrences of such events are not uncommon. When such an event takes place, the damage sustained by the bridge superstructure may be substantial- sometimes even leading to total collapse of the bridge. Out of the available solutions to this problem the most promising and attractive one involves the installation of over-height vehicle detection and warning systems, however, such systems have diverse installation costs, effectiveness and longevity. Moreover, yearly budget constraints limit the number of such installations and there is no guideline as to which bridges should be equipped with such devices. In this study a relatively simple but effective method is developed using only two basic items of information about the bridge (minimum vertical under-clearance) and total number of traffic lanes under the bridge to produce a priority ranking based upon the likelihood of the bridge being hit by an over-height truck. Bridge collision datasets were obtained from three state DOTs- New York, Missouri and Texas and these were used to develop the predictive procedure.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHD37 Standing Committee on Bridge Preservation.

01584066

16-1208

English

13p

2016

Transportation Research Board 95th Annual Meeting

Web

Figures; References (7) ; Tables

Bridge superstructures; Bridges; Height; Vehicles; Warning systems

Missouri; New York (State); Texas

Highways; Safety and Human Factors; I85: Safety Devices used in Transport Infrastructure

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2016 Paper #16-1208

PRP, TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 12 2016 4:33PM