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

Title:

Importance of Winter Urban Traffic Issues and Performance Indicators as Rated by Businesses

Abstract:

Citizens of Sapporo, Japan express a high demand for improved winter road maintenance. Businesspeople were surveyed regarding winter traffic problems and desired outcomes for snow and ice control. The survey examined the importance of winter traffic issues; investigated winter?summer comparisons of vehicle-related costs, numbers of visits to clients, time taken to deliver merchandise, and number of visits by customers; and found winter traffic accidents in the past 5 years. Despite some differences in ranking due to unique features of each business category, three problems ranked high for businesses of all categories: "risk of increased traffic accidents," "decline in visits to clients for meetings/sale," and "increase in time to deliver merchandise." The performance indicators that address these issues are "securing skid-resistance of winter road" and "securing effective road width." These indicators coincided with those ranked high by businesspeople in the opinion survey. Obtaining the achievement rates of indicator targets can enable us to measure outcomes of winter road maintenance. We propose a logic model of winter road maintenance that incorporates the outcome indicators desired by businesses.

Source(s):

6th International Symposium on Snow Removal and Ice Control Technology, Transportation Research Circular, No. E-C063

http://trb.org/publications/circulars/ec063.pdf

Date: 2004

Author:

Yamamoto, Kishi, Sato, Hara

Keywords:


Ice/Frost
Costs
Crashes
Winter maintenance
Safety

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