(air whooshing)
- [Narrator] Smart work zones have been shown
to increase the safety and movement
of traffic on Texas roads.
These work zones have become more common on road projects,
but there are questions about why some areas
have benefited more than others.
The Texas Department of Transportation
and the Texas A&M Transportation Institute
investigated how implementation and maintenance
can influence smart work zones,
and what processes can be improved
and changed on future designs.
- Smart work zones have been shown to be
at a very effective way of improving
both safety and mobility in work zones, but to do so,
they have to be put out where they are most needed,
they have to be designed properly, procured properly,
operated and maintained.
And so this project was designed to investigate
what TxDOT needed to do to increase the effectiveness
of their smart work zone utilization.
- This project was great.
It did look at all smart work zone technologies,
but it really focused on end of queue warning systems.
We have these queues that might develop
because maybe we have a lane closure or a lane reduction.
When we utilize these end of queue warning systems,
it absolutely reduces severe crashes
that happen in work zone queues.
- We did a bit of a, some operational and safety analysis
of of deployments to see how we think,
how effective they were.
- The fact that we've shown that these smart work zones
can reduce severe crashes and save lives
meant that we had to implement it successfully.
So part of it understanding how it has been implemented
was the ability to go out there
and interview the right people at TxDOT
and to review the information that was collected
on the road on the projects.
- Rural districts are struggling a little bit
with how do you design 'em?
What steps, when do I decide when to use 'em,
and those kind of things.
So I think the biggest finding
was by incorporating these recommendations
into their workflows, the use of smart work zones
are gonna be more effective across the state,
not just in the urban areas.
- We're definitely in the implementation phase,
so we're gonna see more implementation
of this technology across TxDOT.
But more exciting than that
is to even think outside of work zones.
We think we have a technology now
to take it to the next step
to basically create an all-in-one unit that we can deploy,
whether that's for special events, emergency situations,
winter weather operations that TxDOT conducts,
things like that.
So we're definitely thinking ahead there.
- For more information and to find the publications
for this project, please visit the TxDOT research library
at the link shown below.