Abstract
Based on the statistics, roadsides include a considerable portion of the fatal crashes annually. Barrier systems are one of the important components of roadside that plays a key role in mitigating the severity of these crashes and save more lives. Despite the substantial role of barrier systems, unfortunately, there is no unified rating system in the barrier condition assessments to utilize for the optimization of the improvements. As the primary contribution in this study, a new Barrier Condition Index (BCI) was proposed to unify the barrier assessment studies to use the same reference for rating barrier systems. This fact makes the decision-makers able to establish a prioritized ranking for optimizing the barrier improvements. For this purpose, the research investigated a comprehensive list of damages in barrier systems. Then, appropriate coefficients were given to the damage types based on their effects on the performance of the system reviewing the previous works. To show the practicability of the new BCI as an example for the whole procedure of the assessment, six different barrier systems located in Wind River Indian Reservation (WRIR), Wyoming, were also evaluated in the study. Based on the evaluation done, the BCI was used to rank the performance of the barriers. Three of the barrier segments at WRIR was introduced as the high-severity level which should be considered in the first priority of the improvement phase.
Highlights
Roadside safety has always been known as an important component of highway systems
The procedure of the barrier assessment was described by a case study conducted in Wind River Indian Reservation (WRIR), Wyoming
As a summary of the procedure, surveyors need to record all the damages and information related to the barriers condition using the proposed “Barrier Condition Assessment (BCA)” worksheet (Fig. 2)
Summary
Roadside safety has always been known as an important component of highway systems. Based on the statistics, only 16% of crashes in the US occurs on the roadside; these crashes mostly conclude in fatalities or highseverity injuries [1]. One of the reasons of the considerable role of barrier systems in fatal crashes is that the initial goal of using barriers was keeping vehicles from running off of the road (or into roadside sharp slopes or the fixed-objects such as culverts), and no consideration was taken into account about the severity of crashes when the vehicles hit the barrier [5]. Inappropriate configurations such as blunt-end (spoon) terminals, turned-down (sloped-end) terminals, and concrete posts became widespread in the early 1960s. This fact is excluded in the existing method presented by RDG [3] since the effect of the side slopes is not considered comprehensively in the calculation of the length-of-need
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