01550135

Component

The deployment of Road Weather Information Systems (RWIS) using state of the art non-invasive pavement sensors together with the atmospheric sensors has advanced the capabilities of the Idaho Transportation Department (ITD) maintenance crews to better plan their winter storm response, both in treatment chemical selection and application timing. The results of the winter maintenance activities are now measured through a Winter Performance Measurement program that evaluates how well each maintenance crew is doing with regards to achieving and maintaining safe grip roads during and after storm events. The results of this recent focus towards data driven maintenance operations has revolutionized the level of service ITD provides its customers in terms of year round safety and mobility. ITD has developed a quantitative data collection procedure to measure the effectiveness of the RWIS and Winter Performance Measure program in improving safety, which was evaluated through a benefit/cost study. This paper compares winter driving crash statistics on road segments prior to the deployment of RWIS sites to crash statistics after winter road condition data became available through RWIS deployment and then calculates a benefit/cost metric. For the study period (2010-45 2013) the benefit/cost is 22, which concludes that strategically deployed RWIS sites and proper utilization of the data easily justifies the investment in infrastructure and operations. For the 3-year study period and the highway segments being analyzed, winter driving fatalities dropped from 5 in the baseline season to 1 in the second season to zero in the third season.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AH010 Surface Transportation Weather.

01550057

15-0242

English

7p

2015

Transportation Research Board 94th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; Maps; References (3) ; Tables

Benefit cost analysis; Crash data; Fatalities; Monitoring; Pavement management systems; Remote sensing; Weather conditions; Winter maintenance

Idaho

Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Safety and Human Factors; I62: Winter Maintenance; I85: Safety Devices used in Transport Infrastructure

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2015 Paper #15-0242

PRP, TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 30 2014 12:13PM