Safety Effects of Winter Weather and Road Maintenance Operations Webinar
- Safety and Mobility Effects of Winter Weather and Road Maintenance
- 08/06/2019
Presenter(s)
Liping Fu
Tae J. Kwon
- Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
- University of Waterloo, University of Alberta
Abstract
Winter weather can have a significant impact on the safety and mobility of highway users. Highway collision rates and traffic congestions often increase considerably during a snow storm due to slippery road conditions and poor visibility, eroding quality of life and increasing societal and economic costs. Winter road maintenance (WRM) such as plowing and salting plays an indispensable role in maintaining good road surface conditions and keeping roads safe. However, winter maintenance operations can also incur significant monetary costs and negative side effects such as damages to the environment, road infrastructure, and vehicles due to salt use. The substantial direct and indirect costs associated with WRM have stimulated significant interest in quantifying the safety and mobility benefits of winter road maintenance for systematic cost-benefit assessments of various WRM related policies, standards, programs, and technologies. The main objective of this seminar is to introduce the fundamentals for quantifying the safety and mobility effects of winter weather and WRM operations, including basic concepts, framework, alternative methods and models, and data needs. The seminar will be organized into two parts, namely, safety effects and mobility effects. The seminar will also provide an overview on the effects of winter weather and maintenance operations on highway safety and mobility, summarize the latest findings on both micro- and macroscopic effects of winter road weather conditions, and demonstrate the applications of various safety and mobility effect models for quantifying the benefits of WRM operations through case studies.
Speaker Bio(s)
Dr. Liping Fu is a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Director of the Innovative Transportation System Solutions (iTSS) Lab at the University of Waterloo. He is a Fellow of Canadian Society for Civil Engineering and the past Chair of Transportation of Division of CSCE. Dr. Fu received Transportation Association of Canada (TAC)'s 2011 Academic Merit Award sponsored by Transport Canada for his long-term contribution to the advancement of the academic field and to the development of tomorrow's transportation leaders. Dr. Fu's research interest specifically focuses on evaluation and optimisation of large, complex traffic and transportation service systems where uncertainty and dynamics play a major role, and on the development of decision support tools for use in managing these systems. He has a long track record of research contributions to the areas of intelligent transportation systems, public transit, road safety, and winter road maintenance. Dr. Fu holds several international patent and software copyrights. Currently, Dr. Fu is leading a number of projects funded by NSERC, Transport Canada, Ministry of Transportation Ontario, City of Toronto, Region of Waterloo, Go Transit, and many industrial partners. He has served on numerous technical committees of various professional organizations, including Transportation Research Board’s Committee, Editorial Advisory Board of the journal of Transportation Research, Intelligent Transportation Systems Society of Canada, Canadian Urban Transit Association, and Institute of Transportation Engineers.
Dr. Tae J. Kwon joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alberta as an Assistant Professor in August 2016, shortly after earning his PhD degree at the University of Waterloo with the prestigious UW Engineering Doctoral Thesis Award. His current research areas include location optimization of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) facilities, winter road maintenance, spatial and temporal analyses of road traffic and safety using geostatistics, geographic information system (GIS) and remote sensing (RS) transportation, and application of Big Data for estimation and forecasting of road and traffic conditions. He is a standing member and communication coordinator of TRB surface transportation weather committee (AH010), and serves as a reviewer for several journals including Journal of Transportation Research Record, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, Journal of Statistical Computing and others. Dr. Kwon has so far published more than 30 papers including peer-reviewed journal and conference papers, project reports and book chapters. Dr. Kwon received the Early Career Researcher Award three times in 2017 and 2018, awarded by the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Alberta. In March 2019, Dr. Kwon received the 2019 Great Supervisor Award for excellent supervisory contributions and dedicated work of great supervisors at the University of Alberta.
