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New Methods for Determining Requirements for Truck-Climbing Lanes

File Language:
English


Details

  • Creators:
  • Corporate Creators:
    Walcoff & Associates
  • Contributors:
    Coleman, Janet A.
  • Corporate Contributors:
    United States. Department of Transportation. Federal Highway Administration
  • Subject/TRT Terms:
  • Publication/ Report Number:
    FHWA-IP-89-022
  • Resource Type:
    Tech Report
  • Geographical Coverage:
    United States
  • Corporate Publisher:
    United States. Department of Transportation. Federal Highway Administration
  • Abstract:
    To facilitate traffic flow and to improve highway safety on upgrades, highway design engineers have constructed hill-climbing lanes. A recent FHWA-sponsored study found that current guidelines may be leading designers to overdesign highways, adding and maintaining unnecessary hill-climbing lanes. The report summarized here highlights four major findings of the earlier FHWA study: (1) current design guidelines are conservative for single-unit trucks and tractor-semitrailers and current critical lengths of grade are thus shorter than these two truck types would warrant, (2) single-unit trucks with trailers and doubles do not perform nearly as well as single-unit trucks and tractor-semitrailers, which may indicate that the performance of the latter two types of trucks match current guidelines, (3) critical length of grade should be based on the weight-to-available power ratio of current truck mix, rather than on assumptions about the performance of a 300-lb/hp truck which was typical in 1965, and (4) highway designers need more comprehensive methods for deciding when hill-climbing lanes are warranted. This report also presents tools developed in the study for designing hill-climbing lanes. This report was based on the following study: "Methods for Predicting Truck Speed Loss on Grades - Final Technical Report: FHWA/RD-86-059" (A).
  • Format:
    PDF
  • Funding:
    DTFH61-88-R-00072
  • Collection(s):
  • Main Document Checksum:
    urn:sha-512:cd1a8d9405ac36f9c286fff82a8d5c2a896b96a3969fd9b8148c203fa8df2de3812b18df4b8e0bebe97162037d2c0b0a446a92ca67af5e44598405d7b03d70df
  • Download URL:
  • File Type:
    Filetype[PDF - 457.46 KB ]
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