Evaluation of safety treatments for roadside culverts.

Details

• Creators:
  Albuquerque, Francisco Daniel B. ; Sicking, Dean L. ; Lechtenberg, Karla A.
• Corporate Creators:
  Midwest Roadside Safety Facility
• Corporate Contributors:
  Iowa. Highway Research Board ; United States. Federal Highway Administration
• Subject/TRT Terms:
  Benefit-cost Analysis Benefit Cost Analysis Culverts Highway Safety Roadside Roadside Safety Analysis Program
• Publication/ Report Number:
  TRP-03-201-09 ; IHRB TR-517
• Resource Type:
  Tech Report
• Geographical Coverage:
  Nebraska
• Edition:
  Final report; 2004-2009.
• Corporate Publisher:
  Midwest Roadside Safety Facility
• Abstract:
  Roadside cross-drainage culverts have been found to impact vehicle accident injury levels.
  
  Designers have commonly used three safety treatments to protect errant drivers from culvert accidents.
  
  These treatments have included: culvert extension, guardrail installation and grating. In order to define
  
  which safety treatment is the most appropriate, benefit-cost analysis has used accident cost reduction to
  
  estimate societal gains earned by using any safety treatment.
  
  The purpose of this study was to estimate accident costs for a wide range of roadway and roadside
  
  characteristics so that designers can calculate benefit/cost ratios for culvert safety treatment options under
  
  any particular scenario.
  
  This study began with conducting a parametric study in order to find variables which have
  
  significant impact on accident cost changes. The study proceeded with highway scenario modeling which
  
  included scenarios with different values for combinations of roadway and roadside variables. These
  
  variables were chosen based upon findings from the parametric study and their values were assigned based
  
  upon highway classification. This study shows that the use of different culvert safety treatments should be
  
  flexible to roadway and roadside characteristics. It also shows that culvert extension and grating were the
  
  safety treatments found to produce the lowest accident costs for all highway scenarios modeled. Therefore,
  
  it is believed that the expanded adoption of culvert extension and culvert grates can improve overall
  
  highway safety.
  
  
• Format:
  PDF
• Collection(s):
  US Transportation Collection
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha256:6dca516d39d218e93598dc6a9b9a6fb58ef79c2c58b28782c1a221c2e4d9c029
• Download URL:
  https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/24113/dot_24113_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 8.53 MB ]