Abstract
Work zones often deviate from normal conditions in terms of geometrics (e.g. lane closure, narrow lanes), striping/markings, signs, and traffic. A Mobile Work Zone (MWZ) is a special category of a work zone where the location of the work zone keeps changing, often rapidly. Despite MWZ safety being of great interest to transportation agencies, they have not studied it formally. This paper presents an examination of MWZs and collisions involving Truck-Mounted Attenuators (TMAs). This examination utilized data fusion of three major databases from Missouri: crash reports, department of transportation claim reports, and MWZ schedules. The fused dataset involved 139 crashes from 2012-2017. The areas of interest included initial impact location, contributing factors, third-party versus employee fault, vehicle type, work zone activity, seasonality, speed limit, time of day, collision lane, and work train configuration. The majority of the crashes were the fault of third parties (>80%) and distraction/inattentiveness was the largest contributory factor (66%). Public outreach and education should emphasize on the difficulty in providing early warnings of MWZs. There is a significant percentage of crashes involving lane changing (39.2%) and even collision of the middle TMA truck (21.8%). Thus, it is important for the public to understand that an entire work train is an integral unit. Higher speed limit dominated MWZ crashes (>75%), even though they only represented 3.6% of the MWZs scheduled. The results of this study on MWZs provide some foundation for other researchers to pursue statistical modeling, assuming that a larger database of MWZ crashes could be developed.
Highlights
Work zone safety is an area that has received significant attention in the transportation community
Others focused on modeling work zone crashes, including crash frequencies using variables such as Annual Average Daily Traffic (AADT), duration, and length, and some even included variables related to detour signage, lane shifts, and lane splits [4, 5, 7 - 10]
One type of model is the Safety Performance Function (SPF), as promoted in the Highway Safety Manual, that predicts the number of Mobile Work Zone (MWZ) crashes given certain variables of exposure (e.g., Claros et al 2018) [42 - 46]
Summary
Work zone safety is an area that has received significant attention in the transportation community. Several researchers have compared work zone crash frequency and severity with non-work zones [1 - 6]. Others focused on modeling work zone crashes, including crash frequencies using variables such as Annual Average Daily Traffic (AADT), duration, and length, and some even included variables related to detour signage, lane shifts, and lane splits [4, 5, 7 - 10]. Smith et al, (2006) [13] found that advanced warning systems using TMAs resulted in fewer drivers reacting in the last 300 meters approaching a work zone. The following are some examples of more recent research related to work zone safety. Clark and Fontaine (2015) [14] investigated whether crashes near work zones were truly due to the presence of work
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