Evaluation of the in-service safety performance of safety-shape and vertical concrete barriers.

Details

• Creators:
  de Albuquerque, Francisco Daniel B. ; Sicking, Dean L.
• Corporate Creators:
  Midwest Roadside Safety Facility
• Corporate Contributors:
  Nebraska. Dept. of Roads ; United States. Federal Highway Administration
• Subject/TRT Terms:
  • Barriers (Roads)
  • Medians
  • Concrete
  • Highway safety
  • Roadside
  • Rollover crashes
  • Crashes
  • Injuries
  • Highway safety
  • Roadside appurtenances
  More +
• Publication/ Report Number:
  TRP-03-259-11
• Resource Type:
  Tech Report
• Geographical Coverage:
  Minnesota
• Edition:
  Final report; 2005-2011.
• Corporate Publisher:
  Midwest Roadside Safety Facility
• Abstract:
  Roadside concrete barriers have been widely used to protect errant motorists from hitting ; roadside hazards or obstacles. Two concrete barrier profiles, vertical and safety-shape, have been used ; for this purpose. The safety-shape profile has been shown to produce excessive vehicle climbing which ; tends to increase rollover propensity. On the other hand, the vertical profile does not cause vehicle ; climbing, but it does produce higher lateral forces which may produce higher injury levels. ; The objective of this research is to investigate which barrier profile is the safest based on realworld ; vehicle crash data. The safest barrier profile is defined as the one that produces lower injury ; levels. Rollover propensity was also used as a second indicator of barrier performance since rollovers ; may also affect injury severity. ; Bridge-related crash data was collected from State maintained highways in the State of Iowa. It ; was found that rollovers are twice more likely to occur in crashes involving safety-shape barriers as ; compared to vertical barriers. It was also found that crashes that involved safety-shape barriers resulted ; in higher injury levels as compared to crashes that involved the vertical barriers. Therefore, it is ; believed that the expanded use of vertical barriers would improve overall highway safety.
  More +
• Format:
  PDF
• Funding:
  SPR-3(017) supplement 35
• Download URL:
  https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/24472/dot_24472_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 922.85 KB]
• Collection(s):
  US Transportation Collection
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha256:2d07f0ca0d32238161cea2707f7ff5caa9ebd9590102ea04d19302711cd0da74