Enhancing Construction Truck Safety at Work Zones: A Microscopic Traffic Simulation Study
Highway work zones are generally considered dangerous, causing hundreds of fatalities every year. One significant task of work zone safety issue is how to manage construction trucks egress from work zones. Previous studies have been conducted to improve truck egress safety, yet few engineering countermeasures have been proposed, which might have a significant improvement of safety at highway work zones. In this study, a microsimulation network of highway work zone interval is built and calibrated using field data in Florida. The impact of work zone truck egress speed is investigated based on the simulation model, and the results indicates that it is significant to provide a sufficient truck acceleration lane inside the work zone. Afterwards, the truck egress system (TES) that aims at providing a sufficient gap for trucks to merging into when egress from the work zone is developed. Then, the truck egress process is simulated with different settings of TES. The results show that the introduction of TES improves the safety, and the best settings for different traffic volume scenarios are selected. The findings of this study could help transportation engineers or decision makers understand the effect of the TES before implementing it in the real field.
- Record URL:
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Supplemental Notes:
- This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ACP55 Standing Committee on Traffic Control Devices.
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Corporate Authors:
Transportation Research Board
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Authors:
- Wang, Zijin
- 0000-0002-3285-433X
- Lee, Jaeyoung
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Conference:
- Transportation Research Board 100th Annual Meeting
- Location: Washington DC, United States
- Date: 2021-1-5 to 2021-1-29
- Date: 2021
Language
- English
Media Info
- Media Type: Digital/other
- Features: Figures; References; Tables;
- Pagination: 19p
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Construction equipment; Microsimulation; Speed; Trucks; Work zone safety
- Geographic Terms: Florida
- Subject Areas: Construction; Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Safety and Human Factors;
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 01763496
- Record Type: Publication
- Report/Paper Numbers: TRBAM-21-00456
- Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
- Created Date: Feb 4 2021 10:54AM