Road Weather Management Program
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Best Practices for Road Weather Management Version 2.0

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Title:

Effects of Winter Weather and Maintenance Treatments on Highway Safety

Abstract:

The ability to assess and quantify the effects of winter weather and maintenance treatments on the safety of highways as related to factors such as weather, road, and treatment characteristics is essential for a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of alternative maintenance strategies and methods and effective communication of the impacts of these strategies and methods to the decision-makers and the public. Two highway routes from Ontario, Canada were selected and data on daily accident occurrences, weather conditions and winter maintenances operations were obtained for this analysis. A statistical analysis was performed on the integrated dataset with the goal of identifying those weather and maintenance factors that had a significant impact on crash frequency. The results indicate that weather conditions such as temperature and precipitation (mainly snow fall) had a significant effect on the crash risk. Anti-icing and prewetting operations were found to have improved road safety at one of the study sites. Sanding operations were found to have a positive effect on the safety at both maintenance routes.

Source(s):

85th Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting; University of Waterloo and Ontario Ministry of Transportation (Canada). For an electronic copy of this resource, please direct your request to WeatherFeedback@dot.gov.

Date: 2006

Author:

Fu, Perchanok, Miranda-Moreno, Quadar

Keywords:


Crashes
Safety
Air temperature
Snow
Precipitation

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