A Review on Work Zone Safety During Blackspot Improvement Construction Under Blackspot Management

Massive Road building and development is being taken up in India, under various schemes, such as National Highway Development Project (NHDP) and Prime Minister’s Rural Road Development Schemes (PMGSY). Activities of improvement of about 45,000 kms of National Highways and around 400,000 kms of rural roads besides numerous urban roads are going on, all across the country. To ensure safety of all, there is a need to adopt an efficient and effective plan for management of traffic in work zones which are already blackspots. Work Zone Traffic Management Plans (WTMPs) are required to meet the safety needs of regular traffic as well as work traffic, ensuring minimum disruption in access to properties and movement of pedestrians. This research is a case study of road accident scenario on NH-152 (Ambala-Zirakpur section). In 28.05 kilometers long stretch it has 24 identified accidental black spots, indicating that about 12-13 km of the road length has engineering faults and lacks adequate infrastructure as per the requirements of the vehicles/pedestrians. This research talks about management of activities involved during its blackspot rectification work in work zone areas. As per this approach researchers have divided whole stretch into 5 corridors and described management of activities with main concern of safety, cost and time. At last, they  have compared traditional approach of blackspot improvement and corridor approach of black spot improvement and finally concluded their study in the form of guidelines which can be adopted during black spot rectification using corridor approach.