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- [Narrator] The Texas Department of Transportation
continuously looks at ways to improve roadway safety.
This includes operating to be in line
with federal requirements to reduce wet weather accidents.
Working with the Texas A&M Transportation Institute,
TxDOT is looking at how to reduce these types of accidents
by focusing on the road's pavement.
- So currently during the design phase,
the designers consider many aspects
that can affect the overall safety of the roadway,
and one of these considerations is materials.
- There are several things that affect
why a person may have an accident in wet weather,
and so we look at the condition of the pavement
and how the car interacts with it.
So currently, TxDOT has a program set up
to select the aggregate that's used on the surface.
In an effort to be more efficient
and effective in the use of how the aggregate is selected,
we wanted to take and merge the aggregate selection
with a Safer By Design tool.
- So when the pavement is wet,
we want to avoid it being slippery while we're driving.
So the selection of the aggregate used
to build the pavement is critical since the aggregate plays
a key role in the interaction between the vehicle tires
and the pavement surface.
- So one of the tasks was to develop
a risk assessment procedure,
and we were able to do that based on an analysis
of the crash records that the DPS provides to TxDOT.
We looked at the pavement condition data
that TxDOT collects annually.
We looked at weather data,
and we combined all that in order to develop a risk
based on the pavement condition
to the potential to have a crash,
and so when we go through
and we select the pavement surfacing that we need,
we can do it on a risk-based assessment.
- For the next steps, we're going to use results
from an ongoing project 0-7151
and will be included into the framework setup
by this project to better predict the pavement friction
and risk of wet weather accidents.
- We recognize that in wet weather we need to slow down
and be more careful, and because of that,
we have to look at the condition on the road,
and we wanna make sure that the road is not slippery.
An important part of that is the interaction with the tire
and the pavement surface.
TxDOT was very supportive of us.
They provided us all of the data that we needed
to do the analysis,
and they were very active in reviewing what we were doing
as we progressed, and they were very helpful to us.
- And the most important results
of this project was definitely the development
of risk levels for the pavement friction in relation
to minimizing wet weather accidents with the main goal
to make the road safer to the traveling public.
- [Narrator] For more information
and to find the publication for this project,
please visit the TxDOT Research Library
at the link shown below.