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Turning the World’s Roads into Forgiving Highways

Imagine the worldwide alarm if a fully loaded Boeing 747 airplane was crashing everyday somewhere around the world. This would be the number one topic in every legislative body, at every dinner table and the lead story on every news channel. Countless amounts of money, energy and time would be spent to come up with some solution to this tragic situation that would threaten to shut down the economies from the United States to Germany to Japan to South Africa to Australia to Chile. Finding an answer to stop these airplanes from crashing would be the single most important issue for all of mankind. The paper describes how, statistically speaking, two and a half to three and a half fully loaded Boeing 747 airplanes crash everyday on the roads around the world. Depending on whose figures you want to use, anywhere from 400,000to 700,000 people are killed every year on the roads. Too often unless the person in the accident is someone close to us or someone famous, no one notices the death and the carnage continues with seemingly little concern by road authorities. Unfortunately, it is impossible to completely eliminate all accidents around the world. As long as humans are driving the vehicles, accidents will happen on the roads. All humans make mistakes. When you make a mistake with a steering wheel in your hand, the result can be a very serious traffic accident. While these accidents will never go away, it is possible to design highways to use today's technology to make these impacts less severe. In effect, this technology is forgiving motorists when they make a mistake, and not making the motorist pay for his or her mistake with capital punishment by giving up his or her life. Highways are often called a country's arteries. It is a deserving description. Just as a body uses veins and arteries to circulate blood, highways are used to circulate people throughout a country. The challenge highway engineers in the Twenty-First Century and beyond is to utilize state of the art technology to provide kilometers of roads in very small areas near, or in cities around the world. This is where people want to live and this is where the roads are needed. One of the inevitable results of these new highway designs, through no fault of the designs themselves, just the lack of ideal geometries, will be black spots, or dangerous potential accident areas. These typically are areas where drivers need to make decisions. When making a decision, the driver can be either right or wrong. Approximately thirty percent of those fatal accidents will be single vehicle, non-pedestrian (SVNP) accidents where a car will run off the road and impact a rigid roadside object. These rigid roadside hazards include bridge abutments, bridge piers in the median, median barrier terminals, bridge rail ends, sign supports, railroad crossing signal arms, or the barrier ends located in the aptly named "gore areas" at exits, to name just a few. Locating a black spot is not difficult. Ask any traffic policeman where additional roadside hazard protection is needed, and he or she will quickly start to tell you when he or she last used the "Jaws of Life" to free a mangled body from a crashed vehicle. Ask an experienced highway design engineer to unfold new highway drawings, and he or she will undoubtedly be able to identify a location with poor geometries that could be a problem. Ask a safety auditor in England or Australia to review an evaluated highway, and he or she will be aware of many roadside locations that could be made safer with improved crash protection. Most qualified experts in the highway safety industry could travel any road in any country around the world and identify multiple dangerous roadside hazards that are not properly shielded. The experts may also identify stopped or slow moving trucks in work zones that can be extremely dangerous to motorists, even when these trucks are fitted with arrow boards, lights and variable message signs. They may also point out inadequate protection for workers and motorists due to the use of cones or barricades in these work zones. Not correcting a dangerous condition on the highway can prove to be a much more costly option than treating the site with a properly designed and tested crash protection. Utilizing proper crash management is proving on a daily basis around the world that it is a highly economic tool that must be used to improve roadway safety.

Language

  • English

Media Info

  • Media Type: Print
  • Features: CD-ROM; Photos; References; Tables;
  • Pagination: 15p
  • Monograph Title: ITE 2005 Annual Meeting and Exhibit Compendium of Technical Papers

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01006808
  • Record Type: Publication
  • ISBN: 1933452080
  • Files: TRIS, ATRI
  • Created Date: Oct 25 2005 11:26AM