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Best Practices for Road Weather Management Version 2.0

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Title:

A Pilot Study to Measure the Potential of using Speed Recovery Duration as a Winter Maintenance Performance Measure

Abstract:

Winter maintenance activity can improve road conditions for travel in terms of mobility and safety, and economic benefit. To improve the effectiveness and the efficiency of winter maintenance activities the performance of the approach taken must be measured. The objective of this research was to develop winter maintenance performance measures using speed data from automatic traffic recorders (ATRs) and winter storm report data. An attempt was made to combine the ATR speed data and the storm report data to determine the average vehicle speed reduction during a snow event relative to normal vehicle speeds at a location, and the duration of time needed from the minimum value to regain normal or average vehicles speeds. Speed Recovery Duration did not show direct relationships with weather factors such as temperatue, snow amount and average amount of snow. However Average Speed Reduciton did correlate well with weather factors (82% explanatory power), but this is based upon limited data.

Source(s):

83rd Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting; University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. For an electronic copy of this resource, please direct your request to WeatherFeedback@dot.gov.

Date: 2004

Author:

Lee, Ran

Keywords:


Winter maintenance
Snow
Speed
Winter storm
Precipitation

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