Pennsylvania Is Making Its Roads Safer and Not In the Way You’d Think
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The Keystone State is limiting accidents on wet pavement by increasing road friction.
Pennsylvania’s roadways are getting safer with the application of a pavement surface treatment designed to improve vehicles’ grip on roadways.
The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and State Transportation Innovation Council recently demonstrated the high-friction surface treatment , TyreGrip, which has already been applied in 42 “high-priority crash locations” statewide.
An additional 102 sites have been flagged to receive the treatment because they’re prone to wet-pavement and curve-related crashes.
STIC reports :
In the past five years, Pennsylvania has experienced nearly 200 fatalities and 500 major injuries each year involving crashes on slippery or wet pavement. Nationally, more than 25 percent of highway fatalities occur at or near horizontal curves each year, even though these curves only make up 5 percent of the nation’s highway miles.
Maintaining the appropriate amount of pavement friction is critical for safe driving. To enhance safety at locations known to have a history of wet-pavement-related crashes, Pennsylvania has begun using pavement treatments that increase friction.
The high-quality, wear-resistant stones sprayed on pavement increase friction improving tire grip, which keeps vehicles in their lanes and allows drivers brake easier on wet roads. Bonding materials set quickly, limiting traffic delays.
A 2013 case study of four locations across three Pennsylvania counties saw four wet pavement crashes with three injuries in the year leading up to treatment drop to zero after TyreGrip’s application.
“We applied it only to the outside lane of a curve and discovered it can be laid so precisely that we didn’t even have to repaint the road lines,” PennDOT District 8 engineer Jason Hershock told STIC.
Pennsylvania’s STIC is a multi-agency effort to modernize the state’s transportation system, the concept for which was introduced in 2010 by the Federal Highway Administration . The goal: create state-based networks for implementing transportation innovations.
Task forces comprised of transportation officials at all levels of governments chart the course for strategic deployment and may be expanded to include additional sectors.
With traffic increasing on the nation’s aging highways and staffing and money limited, demonstrations like that of TyreGrip spread cutting-edge techniques statewide faster than they would otherwise be adopted.
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