Assessing pavement conditions and their effect on road safety: Ontario experience

Abstract

The increasing need to rebuild and repair Ontario highways has motivated this research aimed at maximizing the efficiency of pavement maintenance and design. The first of two complementary objectives were to evaluate the safety improvements of reduced pavement roughness on two-lane undivided Ontario highways using the Empirical Bayes and Cross-Sectional analysis methods. The second objective was to improve the prediction of pavement distress and surface roughness by examining the impact of local calibration of prediction models. The findings suggest that better pavement conditions can reduce the severity of fatal and injury collisions by as much as 12% in some cases and therefore that pavement maintenance decisions should incorporate road safety when assessing cost-life analysis. The results provide a basis for those decisions in that they can be used to estimate the safety effect of a specific improvement in roughness.