Enhancing Construction Truck Safety at Work Zones: A Microscopic Traffic Simulation Study

Highway work zones are generally considered dangerous, causing hundreds of fatalities every year. One significant task of work zone safety issue is how to manage construction trucks egress from work zones. Previous studies have been conducted to improve truck egress safety, yet few engineering countermeasures have been proposed, which might have a significant improvement of safety at highway work zones. In this study, a microsimulation network of highway work zone interval is built and calibrated using field data in Florida. The impact of work zone truck egress speed is investigated based on the simulation model, and the results indicates that it is significant to provide a sufficient truck acceleration lane inside the work zone. Afterwards, the truck egress system (TES) that aims at providing a sufficient gap for trucks to merging into when egress from the work zone is developed. Then, the truck egress process is simulated with different settings of TES. The results show that the introduction of TES improves the safety, and the best settings for different traffic volume scenarios are selected. The findings of this study could help transportation engineers or decision makers understand the effect of the TES before implementing it in the real field.