(dramatic whoosh)
- [Voice-Over] There's
a multimillion dollar maintenance problem
that's occurring in Texas's cold country.
Snowplows are inadvertently scraping off
the retroreflective pavement markers,
which are applied to pavements
for safety purposes.
- When that takes place, our road is now
without an additional safety device
for a period of time
until we can get it reinstalled.
And then the second thing is,
is that when those RPMs are knocked off the road,
there's a significant reinstall cost
that TxDOT spends placing those back.
And that can be millions of dollars
across the whole state.
- [Voice-Over] It's a nagging problem.
But thanks to researchers
with the Center for Transportation Research
at the University of Texas,
help could be in the works.
- We did conduct a survey,
as part of this project,
to various TxDOT Districts
to try to get a better understanding
about how large is this problem.
Is it only 10% of the markers
that are being removed?
And you had some districts such as Amarillo,
I believe they said around 90%
of their RPMs are removed every single year
just due to snowplow operations.
So, for this project,
what we decided to do was
to look at rumble strips.
However, the really cool thing
about these rumble strips are
that they have grooves.
So, the idea behind this project was
maybe we can use these rumble strips grooves
and use those grooves as a way
to protect the RPMs from being dislodged.
You want to put these markers
as deep as possible,
because that is going to
provide the most protection
against the snowplow.
But, the purpose of these markers are actually
to provide nighttime visibility.
So you have this optimization problem
in which you want to put them as low as possible,
but still have good nighttime retroflectivity.
- [Glenn] We picked a road out
and then we put these RPMs
inside the rumble strips,
and we ran the snowplow over it
as a short test strip.
And then with a positive outcome
from that result, then we took that
and we put it in one location
in the Wichita Falls District.
And then we put it in another location
in the Amarillo District, two different roads.
And so we got to see 'em function
in a pretty small test section,
but actually in the field after a snow storm.
And we had positive results.
- We're finding that,
when we have snowplow operations,
when we're taking these low profile markers
and just embedding them into the rumble strips
that you'll have around 75% to 80%
of your markers still being present
on the pavement surface compared to 90%
of your markers being dislodged.
We do see qualitatively
that we have really good retroflectivity.
So, the next stage for this project
is actually to do an implementation project
in which we're utilizing this method
in highways across Texas.
- Hopefully, if all this is successful,
we can can work maybe
to start getting this put into some
of our standards and start trying
to implement more statewide.
- [Voice-Over] For more information
and to find the publications for this project,
please visit the TxDOT research library
at the link shown below.