Winter Road Maintenance - A Comparison of Alternative Performance Measures and Service Standards (Poster)

For transportation departments responsible for winter road maintenance (WRM), performance measurement and establishment of service standards are the essential ingredients for their ensured success. This has become even more so recently due to increased privatization of winter maintenance work and increased public concerns over the detrimental effects of road salt on the environment, the infrastructure, and the vehicles. However, there are two particular challenges in establishing appropriate WRM performance measures and service standards. First, the main determinant of winter maintenance efforts and outcomes is the snow storms which vary over space and time considerably, which makes it difficult to conduct some of the common performance measurement tasks such as performance benchmarking and trend analysis. Secondly, the relationships between the outcomes of maintenance operations (e.g., safety and mobility), outputs (e.g., bare pavement recovery time and pavement friction), and inputs (e.g., amount of salt used and hours of operations) are confounded by many uncontrollable variables such as storm severity, road characteristics, and traffic conditions, making it difficult to develop performance measures and service standards that are both outcome oriented (attributable) and controllable. Therefore, WRM remains to be a sector that lacks uniform performance measures and service standards. For the covering abstract of this conference see ITRD record control number 201310A334E.

• Record URL:
  http://conf.tac-atc.ca/english/annualconference/tac2013/poster1/fu.pdf
• 
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Association of Canada (TAC)

  401-1111 Prince of Wales Drive
  Ottawa, Ontario  Canada 
• Authors:
  • Fu, L
  • Cao, Jiannong
  • THAKALI, L
  • PERCHANOK, MS
  • McClintock, H
• Conference:
  • 2013 CONFERENCE AND EXHIBITION OF THE TRANSPORTATION ASSOCIATION OF CANADA - TRANSPORTATION: BETTER - FASTER - SAFER
• Publication Date: 2013

Language

• English

Media Info

• Pagination: 1 p.
• Monograph Title: 2013 Conference and Exhibition of the Transportation Association of Canada - Transportation: Better - Faster - Safer

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Administration; Conferences; Evaluation; Level of service; Safety; Winter maintenance
• Uncontrolled Terms: Efficiency
• Geographic Terms: Canada
• ITRD Terms: 155: Administration; 8018: Canada; 8525: Conference; 5911: Efficiency; 9020: Evaluation (assessment); 653: Level of service; 1665: Safety; 2593: Winter maintenance
• Subject Areas: Safety and Human Factors; I62: Winter Maintenance;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01518077
• Record Type: Publication
• Source Agency: Transportation Association of Canada (TAC)
• Files: ITRD, TAC
• Created Date: Mar 11 2014 11:00AM