Best Practices for Road Weather Management Version 2.0
Title:
Crash Analysis to Improve Winter Weather Traffic Safety
Abstract:
Weather affects many aspects of transportation, but there are three predominant and measurable dimensions of inclement weather's impact on highway traffic: traffic demand, traffic safety, and traffic flow relationships. Understanding these impacts will help highway agencies, transportation companies, and individuals better manage the risks and uncertainties inherent in inclement weather conditions. Traditionally highway agencies, transportation companies, and individuals have primarily reacted to inclement weather and attempted to mitigate its impacts. With a better understanding of weather's impacts, however, and with better weather forecasts, transportation agencies, transportation firms, and individuals can more proactively manage their requirements and actions before and during inclement weather. This paper describes work being done at Iowa State University's Center for Weather Impacts on Mobility and Safety (C-WIMS) working with the Iowa Department of Transportation to quantify weather's impact on highway traffic and how we are seeking solutions problematic winter weather safety problems. Ultimately our analysis drills down to specific location of individual winter weather related crashes over a ten year period on Iowa's interstates system. Maps of the worst winter weather crash locations were presented to Iowa's garage level managers and select operators to help them make adjustments to snow-plow truck routing and schedules and winter maintenance application to address winter weather related crashes.
Source(s):
86th Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting; Iowa State University, Center for Weather Impacts on Safety and Mobility. For an electronic copy of this resource, please direct your request to WeatherFeedback@dot.gov.
Date: 2007
Author:
Maze, Hans
Keywords:
Safety
Winter storm
Driver behavior
PDF files can be viewed with the Acrobat® Reader®.
