(dramatic music plays)
- [Narrator] Because of their higher rate of crashes
and crash severity,
rural roadways have been a major focus
of experts trying to improve safety and mobility.
When these roads have a sudden increase
in traffic, like they do during oil booms,
crash numbers often rise too.
This project began when
the TxDot Odessa district engineer focused on problems
with two of his local highways.
Researchers with the Texas
A&M Transportation Institute joined the effort
and expanded the project with groundbreaking results.
- It's proven that four lane
undivided roads in rural areas
have a poor safety performance.
- We go out in the morning after some
of these folks have been running
around the oil field, drilling and fracking
and we see these gigantic rear view mirrors
where they had, gone past one another
and knocked a mirror off.
Then of course, we did have some real
head to head on collisions and fatalities.
- The Odessa district wanted us to look
at some cross sections for undivided roadways,
both two lane and a multi-lane undivided roadways.
- [John] What we were trying to do is figure out
how we could move those vehicles apart
so that if you're going two lanes in one direction,
two lanes come from the other,
the folks in the middle wouldn't hit each other.
- We got a cross section of different roadways
across the state.
All the way from this four lane undivided
with just a center line stripe.
Some of the roadways
where this had already been done,
where the four lane, four foot median buffer
had been put in.
And we also looked at some two lane configurations.
Most specifically the super two.
The idea was let's look at these things.
Let's look at their safety performance.
Let's evaluate how efficiently they can carry traffic,
and come up with some recommendations for the department
in terms of what's the best thing to put in what place.
- I think of this tool, this particular study,
as having developed a methodology
for how to help your road grow up.
Does it have enough of the right types
of things for that volume of traffic?
That's the key.
These are relatively low traffic roadways
that grow up, and as those volumes change,
and as the nature of that traffic changes,
you now have a tool that will help you select the right type
of cross section for that roadway.
- (Srinivas) Everything is just re-striping
the existing cross section, which our base condition here
is the four lane undivided highways.
So it's just re-striping
either by reducing the shoulders or reducing the lanes
and either giving a four foot median buffer in the middle
or creating a separate continuous left turn lane.
- If you have a rural setting, where the roadways
are being used for something other
than traditional farm activities,
this study can help you develop those specific tools
that you can put into place on the ground,
that will reduce the risk of having a hotspot,
where accidents continue to occur.
That's the part that we think is so exciting
about all this is.
It's not something that's just for the Permian Basin.
It's something that can be used anywhere
you have an unusual roadway configuration for the typical,
whatever typical is, rural setting.
- [Narrator] For more information
and to find the publications for this project,
please visit the TxDOT Research Library
at the link shown below.