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

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Title:

The Impact of Weather Conditions on Road Safety Investigated on an Hourly Basis

Abstract:

In this paper we investigate the impact of several weather conditions on the hourly number of crashes in the Netherlands during 2002. The impact of 17 climatic factors, belonging to the categories wind, temperature, sunshine, precipitation, weather image and visibility is quantified and compared with results from other research. The following could be concluded: an increase in maximum wind gust causes an increase in the number of crashes. Global radiation and sunshine duration both have a significant negative impact on road safety. Of all categorical weather indicators, presence of precipitation had the most significant impact. Moreover, the impact of precipitation duration seemed higher than the amount of precipitation. Finally, the direction of the effect of cloudiness on the number of crashes was also found positive.

Source(s):

85th Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting; Hasselt University, Belgium and Ministry of Transport (Netherlands)

http://uhdspace.uhasselt.be/dspace/bitstream/1942/1365/1/impact%20of%20weather.pdf

Date: 2006

Author:

Hermans, Brijs, Stiers, Offermans

Keywords:


Safety
Wind
Air temperature
Precipitation
Visibility

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