01366065

Component

Highways are comprised of tangent and curved sections. It has been established that there is a difference in safety between these types of sections. Roadside safety hardware, however, is not specifically designed or tested to address the differences in behavior that may be associated with placement of curves relative to tangent sections. The differences in safety performance may be negligible due to a host of intervening factors, but given little formal attention on this matter, that remains an open question at present. This effort stems from a crash into a barrier that occurred on a superelevated curve. It represents an attempt to determine if simulation tools can provide useful insights on the impact dynamics, influencing factors, and the likely outcomes. Simulation analyses were undertaken for three curvature conditions for National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Report 350 crashworthiness criteria for the 2000P and 820S vehicles. Three types of concrete barriers were evaluated based upon NCHRP Report 350 metrics. The results suggest that adverse safety performance is more likely for the more highly sloped barriers when impacted on the sharper curves. The influences of various factors were analyzed and a criticality table was generated to indicate the effects of combination of factors for barriers on curved roads. The influence of vertical slope and superelevation were also considered to a limited degree.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AFB20 Roadside Safety Design

01362476

12-2585

English

20p

2012

Transportation Research Board 91st Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; Photos; References; Tables

Barriers (Roads); Concrete; Crashworthiness; Highway curves; Highway safety; Simulation

Design; Highways; Safety and Human Factors; I20: Design and Planning of Transport Infrastructure; I82: Accidents and Transport Infrastructure

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2012 Paper #12-2585

TRIS, TRB

Feb 8 2012 5:10PM