2019 Road Weather Management Performance Measures Update

Chapter 6. Recommendations and Conclusions

The Road Weather Management Program (RWMP) is at a crucial point in its program evolution, with close to 15 years of research and development, stakeholder enagement, and accomplishments. Overall, the program's role in enabling improved management of the transportation system during adverse weather is evident in the strong growth in use of tools, programs, and activities by the State departments of transportation (DOTs). In the last few years, particularly in the time period of this update, the program has focused on advancing the deployment of proven strategies through the EDC initiative. The selected EDC-4 (Weather-Savvy Roads) and EDC-5 (Weather Responsive Management Systems) initiatives have allowed the program to largely focus efforts on advancing deployment of four major strategies—Integrated Mobile Observations, Pathfinder, Weather Responsive Traffic Management, and Weather Responsive Maintenance Management Systems. As a consequence, the performance measurement show sustained interest and growth in all four of these strategies around the United States. As the EDC-4 and EDC-5 intiatives ramp down, the question becomes: What are the next steps for the program in terms of supporting the advancement of road weather management practices? The 2019 performance measurement provides some clues about likely needs and requirements for the program, including:

• Need for more case studies on material management practices, especially documenting approaches that State DOTs have taken to optimize their usage of salt. Aside from ancedotal information, it is hard to find recent published results on this topic. Similarly, statistics about road weather impact are getting dated and need to be refreshed. New private sector data, including the National Performance Measurement Research Data Set, may provide approaches to rapidly assess road weather impacts on delays and congestion. Similarly, more information about route optimization, reduction of deadhead time and miles are expected to be major initiatives at the State DOTs in upcoming years.
• Need to re-engage State DOTs around Road Weather Information System (RWIS) data sharing. This update revealed that State DOT contributions to MADIS have regressed. While 5 new States have a signed MADIS data sharing agreement, 13 have dropped from the program, according to the State DOT survey. The role of RWIS data sharing may re-emerge as a priority especially with other voluntary data exchanges being developed to support automated driving systems (ADS). RWMP's Clarus initiative and transition to MADIS in some ways was ahead of its time in terms of creating a voluntary data exchange of road weather sensor data, but quality-checked road weather sensor data continues to be a priority for ADS development. However, it is important to note that the development of the MADIS system is outside the control of the RWMP and subject to NOAA's research priorities and resource availabilty. It is likely that once MADIS deploys the QA/QC algorithms used in Clarus to production, the utility of the system to DOTs will increase.
• Overall, there is significant growth in the use of data generated from vehicle platforms for road weather maintenance. More than three quarters of State DOTs collect mobile observations from their vehicle fleets. Of the 39 State DOTs surveyed, 30 (76.9%) reported collecting real-time field data from maintenance vehicles. This is up from 23 State DOTs from the prior period (57.5%). Compared to the 2017 survey, there was an overall increase in the number of States reporting that they collect at least 25% of their real-time field data from plow status and material usage, atmospheric weather data (e.g., air temperature, relative humidity), and road weather conditions data (e.g., pavement temperature). Maintaining these advancements requires the RWMP to support overall maturity in the use of these systems, including data management practices, application development, and operations and maintenance of these systems.
• A map of survey respondents and analysis of State involvement reveal a clear geographical gap in engagement with the southeastern States. This may result in part from the program's historic focus on winter weather-related activities. However, the non-winter related roadway management needs are growing with hurricanes, flooding, dust storms creating sustained pressures on the State DOTs to respond. The RWMP can better understand the needs of States that are routinely affected by non-winter events by broadening outreach efforts to include assessing road weather impacts from flooding, hurricanes, dust storms, etc.

Overall, 2017-2019 have seen continued advancements in use of road weather management tools and practices supported by the RWMP. Interest among stakeholders is strong and has continued to grow since the last update. More States are being engaged by the program through workshops, training, technical assistance, and research and development.