Safety evaluation of wet-reflective pavement markings.

Details

• Creators:
  Lyon, Craig ; Persaud, Bhagwant ; Eccles, Kimberly A.
• Corporate Creators:
  VHB/Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, Inc. ; Persaud Lyon, Inc.
• Corporate Contributors:
  United States. Federal Highway Administration
• Subject/TRT Terms:
  • Reflectorized road markings
  • Raised road markings
  • Highway safety
  • Traffic safety
  • Wet-reflective pavement markings
  • Low-cost
  • Safety improvements
  • Safety evaluations
  • Empirical Bayesian
• Publication/ Report Number:
  FHWA-HRT-15-065
• Resource Type:
  Tech Report
• Geographical Coverage:
  United States
• Corporate Publisher:
  United States. Federal Highway Administration
• Abstract:
  The Federal Highway Administration organized a pooled fund study of 38 States to evaluate low-cost safety strategies as part of its strategic highway safety effort. One of the strategies selected for evaluation was the application of wet-reflective pavement markings. This strategy involves upgrading existing markings from standard marking materials to wet-reflective markings applied as a paint, tape, or thermoplastic material. The purpose was to provide an improved level of retroreflectivity in wet-road conditions. Geometric, traffic, and crash data were obtained for treated freeway sections in Minnesota, North Carolina, and Wisconsin; treated two-lane rural road locations in Minnesota; and treated multilane road sections in Wisconsin. To account for potential selection bias owing to regression-to-the-mean, an Empirical Bayes (EB) before–after analysis was conducted. The analysis also controlled for changes in traffic volumes over time and time trends in crash counts unrelated to the treatment. Intersection-related, snow/slush ice, and animal crashes were excluded from the analysis. For freeways, the ; combined results for all States indicated reductions in crashes that are statistically significant at the 95-percent confidence level for injury and wet-road crashes, with estimated crash modification factors (CMFs) of 0.881 and 0.861, respectively. For multilane roads, statistically significant reductions were estimated for total crashes ; (CMF = 0.825), injury crashes (CMF = 0.595), run-off-road crashes (CMF = 0.538), wet-road crashes (CMF = 0.751), and nighttime crashes (CMF = 0.696). For two-lane roads, the sample of crashes was too small to detect an effect with statistical significance for any of the crash types, but there were indications that the treatment had a safety benefit for wet-road crashes. Benefit–cost ratios estimated with conservative cost and service life ; assumptions were 1.45 for freeways and 5.44 for multilane roads. The results suggest that the treatment—even with conservative assumptions on cost, service life, and value of a statistical life—can be cost effective, especially for multilane roads.
• Format:
  PDF
• Funding:
  DTFH61-13-D-00001
• Download URL:
  https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/35747/dot_35747_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 1.15 MB]
• Collection(s):
  Federal Highway Administration
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:7ace07ea1b861657e2bb63170c5ed5fae314bb6f491cb5191d0932b19f3bf6c95f7214811760c50ca301addbf3698a5684394e61d768225938a6a1f978c4768f