Conceptualizing How Agencies Could Leverage Weather-Related Connected Vehicle Application to Enhance Winter Road Services

Abstract

Winter inclement weather negatively influences the safety, mobility, economy, and user experience of roadway transportation systems. Ice and snowfall conditions result in more accidents and casualties and reduce the travel speed and roadway capacity because of decreased friction and visibility. Precise and timely road weather information is necessary for road maintenance decisions and high level-of-service trips of road users. In this context, connected vehicle (CV) technologies hold great promise in addressing the various influences of winter weather on the safety and mobility of road users. This work started from a nationwide survey of US and Canadian road maintenance departments to evaluate whether and how CV technologies are perceived by the practitioners for their potential in improving winter roadway safety and mobility. All respondents to the survey thought positively of the potential of CV application in improving winter road services, even though some expressed concerns over whether the system would perform well in poor weather, how to address risks associated with vehicle and system security, and the probability of increased driver distraction. This work presents a concept of operations, including the potential application and operational scenarios of CV technologies for agencies to improve winter road services. For instance, agencies may leverage the CV/mobile collection capabilities to provide customized and route-specific (disaggregated) road weather data to support more proactive and resource-efficient maintenance strategies and tactics and provide road users with more reliable, timely, and more localized travel alerts and advisories.