Leave it to Canadian engineers to find a better way to deal with winter driving!
Between blowing snow, messy slush and treacherous black ice, driving in a Canadian winter is no picnic, especially given how quickly the road conditions can change. It’s a risk that Canadian road maintenance agencies have struggled with for a long time, but there remains little consistency in road condition reporting.
If you’re trying to decide between taking a highway tagged as “partially snow covered” and one tagged as “bare with icy sections,” which is more likely to leave you stuck in the ditch?
A new study recently published in The Canadian Journal of Civil Engineering offers a solution that aims to provide more consistency and reduce risks to drivers and their passengers.
The study authors, researchers from the department of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Waterloo, created a risk-based system of assessing road surface conditions during winter weather events.
The relative risk index (RRI) estimates the risk of collision using a model calibrated by compiling data from a variety of sources, including detailed hourly weather reports, road surface conditions, traffic and accident histories from six winter seasons (2000-2006) and 31 highway sections in Ontario.
One of the biggest challenges was finding a way to address the issue of highways with non-uniform driving conditions. This is a frequent issue on Canadian roadways, where geography and shifting weather patterns can cause road safety conditions (RSC) to change from one mile to the next.
As the old saying goes: “If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes.”
The researchers suggested two alternative approaches to address this challenge.
One method simply assessed the relative risk increase compared to normal conditions. The second method took a more conservative approach, aggregating the relative risk between individual classes of road conditions on a given highway and creating a single dominant class for the entire route.
This class tended to be made up of the most predominant as well as the most dangerous conditions reported on the route.
The researchers based the classification system of the RRI on an existing universal RSC classification system recently devised by the Transportation Association of Canada (TAC).
“An ideal classification system for the public should be one that is simple, intuitive and consistent”, explained Lalita Thakali, one of the authors of the study. The RRI model proposed by Thakali and her fellow researchers is intended to render the TAC system more useful in assessing the actual collision risks for drivers and passengers.
The researchers also expect that the recommendations from their study could have uses beyond collision risk assessment. For example, the RRI could be used to define other types of performance measures for transportation agencies, such as monitoring winter maintenance activities, like plowing.
An obvious limitation of the study was that it was confined to the Ontario highway system, which is why the researchers have suggested exploring the feasibility of developing a universal risk index that could be applied to larger geographic areas.
Until that happens, be wary of winter road warnings and don’t forget to keep a shovel and some kitty litter in your trunk, just in case.
For a different approach to improving winter driving, find out how conductive concrete could make roads safer.