BASt-Bericht

Seiten
Erscheinungsjahr: 2010
Preis: €

Bestellung eines gedruckten Exemplars.

The present discussion of road safety related issues yields an urge for safety enhancements especially on German single-lane rural roads. Abroad, transversal rumble strips (TRS) are a common tool to alert drivers and reduce their velocity in the approach of accident hotspots. Thus, the use of rumble strips leads to an increase in road safety.

The national and international status quo concerning the application of TRS was determined by means of literature research and interviews of members of several road authorities. Based on the survey's results and on theoretical principles regarding acoustics, haptics, and psychology, some possible design variants were developed. In addition to psychological, physical and traffic related fundamentals, the design also featured operational, constructional and financial aspects.

These different concepts were realised in test areas on which vehicles with a variety of sensors passed over the rumble strips at all relevant speeds. The passenger compartments' acoustics and vibrations were measured and analyzed with respect to their psychological effect on the driver in order to optimize the rumble strips’ shape and their distance.

Subsequently, four hazardous rural road sections were chosen to field-test the strips' overall effect on the traffic. Here, the already theoretically designed and meanwhile optimized variants were realised and vehicles' speeds as well as the general driving behaviour were monitored. During this inquiry no precarious driving manoeuvres could be observed. A before-after-comparison showed a significant decrease of velocity by several kmph while the TRS were in use. Finally, a survey in which both residents and drivers took part at the end of the field test revealed an over-all acceptance for the adopted measure by the mainly local road users. The residents showed less acceptance towards the TRS mainly due to the – partially measurable – increase of noise emissions.

However, due to the decrease of velocity in line with an increasing attentiveness an improvement of road safety is expected on the analyzed rural road sections.