Brief Project Description: Historically, season-to-season variability in winter weather and the absence of quantifiable methods for measuring either winter severity or snow and ice control (SIC) performance have made planning and budgeting for SIC activities challenging. Recent research initiatives undertaken by VTrans and other snowbelt DOTs have established objective measures for weather severity and SIC costs, creating the opportunity to quantify these relationships. For this project, the research team utilized these recently established severity measures and VTrans SIC cost data to develop a cost estimation tool that projects expected SIC costs for user-specified winter severity levels. This tool will support VTrans in making data-driven decisions about appropriate levels of investment in SIC for a given winter forecast and potentially improve SIC performance management by comparing current cost-effectiveness to that seen in the historical data.
Poster:
Fact Sheet Presentation Other Q&A
Presenter: James Sullivan, UVM
Contact: James Sullivan, james.sullivan@uvm.edu