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

Title:

Development of a Wet Pavement Index to Assess the Risk of Skidding Accidents

Abstract:

Traditionally, the most common action conducted by highway agencies to prevent skidding accidents on wet pavements has been skid resistance surveying of roads. However, there is strong evidence, confirmed by analysis of data from 308 road sites, that pavement skid resistance correlates poorly with the number of wet pavement skidding accidents and thus is not a reliable measure of wet pavement safety. In this paper, three models of traffic safety under wet conditions are presented including two deterministic models and a probabilistic model. The models incorporate many variables, other than skid resistance, that affect safety such as average daily traffic, driving difficulty, and wet weather exposure. The models were validated using a set of data collected on roads in Pennsylvania.

Source(s):

Pennsylvania Transportation Institute, Pennsylvania State University. For an electronic copy of this resource, please direct your request to WeatherFeedback@dot.gov.

Date: NA

Author:

Kulakowski, et al

Keywords:


Crashes
Safety
Pavement friction

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