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

Title:

Investigation of Atmospheric Impacts on Spring Load Restriction Limits Imposed by State Transportation Agencies

Abstract:

Freezing and thawing of subsurface soils is a common occurrence in cold regions. This process results in hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to roadways throughout the United States every year. As springtime thawing takes place, the weakened roadbeds are susceptible to damage caused by vehicles carrying heavy loads due to water in the soils trapped between the road surface and the frozen subsurface. State DOTs attempt to mitigate damage by placing load restrictions on roads not designed for the necessary load-bearing capacity to withstand weakened conditions, or roads with significant amount of distress present, which do not have efficient loadbearing capacity to support loads under such conditions. The primary concern with load restriction placement is recognizing the right time to put them into place such that the impact to commercial traffic is minimized while the structural integrity of the roadway is maintained. The goal of this research was to determine the benefits of using such a modeling system and to identify situations in which this system performs well and/or poorly. This was done using an integrated climatic model driven solely by atmospheric conditions to model soil conditions.

Source(s):

84th Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting, University of North Dakota. For an electronic copy of this resource, please direct your request to WeatherFeedback@dot.gov.

Date: 2005

Author:

Hanson

Keywords:


Decision support
Subsurface conditions
Benefits
Access control
Traffic control

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