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- Roadway Departure Crashes are a leading cause
of injuries and deaths on our state roadways.
Even though there are numerous things
that can be done to prevent these crashes from happening.
There are simply too many lane miles
to be cost-effective.
Researchers with the Texas A&M Transportation Institute
have developed a new analysis to pinpoint those roads where
countermeasures should be implemented.
- Roadway Departure Crashes,
is a crash where a vehicle actually leaves the travel lane
that can either be to the right.
And if they leave to the right
they'd leave off the pavement.
There may be obstacles there, trees, power poles.
The other way they leave the road
is to the left, which can lead to an head-on collision.
- When a Roadway Departure Crash happens
it's a chain of events that typically starts
with maybe a distraction or a mechanical malfunctions.
This is the stuff that we as engineers.
We cannot predict that when is that gonna happen?
Where is that gonna happen?
And when it happens, you know,
everything that you did in the road to make it safe,
it's not useful anymore.
Do you need to go to plan B, which is the roadside
you need to have the roadside protected.
So that, that person is not gonna die.
- In this project.
We're really trying to find the best systemic approach
for prioritizing sites that are more at risk
of a roadway departure based on actual data from Texas,
we look at speed.
We look at curve density, shoulder width, lane width.
And so to physically measure all of that
all the way across the state of Texas was insurmountable.
It's too much.
So Google earth is the next best option on trying
to capture that data.
And while Google is not accurate to the centimeter
for this type of information, 10 foot-12 foot lane,
that that can be captured out at Google.
- There's three types of things that you can do
to prevent Roadway Departure Crashes.
You can design the road with parameters
that makes it less likely,
say a horizontal curve, it's very tight.
That's gonna be very prone to roadway departure.
You can also try to give them feedback
when they are gonna depart.
I don't know if you're familiar with, rumble strips.
The idea of that is you're distracted.
You're going off the road, but then your car vibrates
and that gives you some sense to go back, right?
The other strategy is once you departed the road
say you're in the shoulder,
the wider the shoulder the likelihood
of you coming back to the road is higher.
There are strategies, okay?
The person's already out of the road
already out of the shoulder.
Now let's make it less likely that,
that person is gonna die.
So if you hit a tree head on,
your likelihood of dying is really high,
but if there's a guard rail there,
then that diminishes the chances of you dying.
- I think always a good research project leads
to more research.
I think one of the options would be
to pilot some of the districts,
obviously Texas is a huge state
with lots of geographical areas.
And so we really try to see West Texas versus East Texas
you know, does this data
when you put in a pilot and start condensing in
the site area and gather more information,
does it still confirm what we think we know
and for the positive results that came out of it,
we double down on what works.
If we know texture works on shoulders,
then we continue to find ways to do that.
Whether it's through construction funds or safety funds
or however we go about doing it,
we try to ensure that we're implementing the things
that we know are good things on our projects
- For more information,
and to find the publications for this project,
please visit the TxDOT Research Library
at the link shown below.