The friction provided by a roadway surface affects how vehicles interact with the roadway. Measuring, monitoring, and maintaining pavement friction can prevent many roadway departures and intersection related crashes, which account for approximately 75 percent of traffic fatalities across the United States. Both wet-pavement and dry-pavement crashes can be mitigated by improving pavement friction and texture, resulting in fewer serious injuries and fatalities.
The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) advocates reducing deaths on our nation’s highway system to zero. A safe system is how we will get there. While no crashes are desirable, the Safe System Approach (SSA) prioritizes fatal and serious injury crashes and aims to eliminate them for all road users. A strategy on preventing crashes on the nation’s roadway network must reach beyond educating road users on how best to navigate the road sections, but rather focus on creating safer roads, which is an SSA element. Continuous Pavement Friction Measurement (CPFM) falls into the safer roads element of the SSA.
CPFM is an established and proven approach that has been used for several decades in Europe and New Zealand and could revolutionize the role of pavement friction in framing our understanding and management of the safety performance of the roadway system in the United States.
Pavement friction is not currently a parameter widely used in crash-based safety modeling in the same way as other roadway characteristics, such as number and width of travel lanes; presence, width, and type of shoulder; degree of curvature; etc. By investing in CPFM for a Pavement Friction Management Program that collects pavement friction data on a jurisdiction’s roadway network, combined with existing geometric data and other risk factors, agencies will be better prepared to design roadway environments that make for safer roads and safer road users.
This paper will provide background on CPFM, present case studies from the United Kingdom and other countries and demonstrate why CPFM is needed to reduce crashes across the country. Further, this paper will include the technology and the methodology of pavement friction data collection using CPFM and support the argument for it with case studies. Resources for implementing CPFM will also be provided.