Abstract Manager

As a proven, cross-cutting safety countermeasure for reducing the frequency and severity of vehicle crashes, Pavement Friction Management (PFM) provides road agencies with a powerful tool for balancing the existing roadway friction (i.e. supply) with that required by vehicles to navigate various geometric features (i.e. demand) across their entire road network.

Between 2020 and 2024, the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet (KYTC) embarked on an ambitious network-level effort to collect 15,000 miles of continuous pavement friction and texture data annually on state-maintained roads with the ultimate goal of reducing injuries and fatalities.  Not only did this effort provide a baseline of existing pavement friction at high resolution, but also collected replicate data on all pavement sections either annually on high-volume roads or bi-annually on lower-volume roads.  This unprecedented data collection effort is ongoing, as are efforts to characterize network performance from the resulting friction dataset.

With a focus upon pavement management and material performance in service, this paper will present the preliminary insights uncovered through analysis of thousands of miles (kilometres) of continuous pavement friction data, including the influence of material selection and composition, roadway geometry, and traffic loading on pavement friction performance. Many insights reinforce conventional wisdom although some challenge conventional thinking with respect to mixture composition and ultimately agency specifications. Challenges associated with data management at the network-scale, project-level data input quality, and data aggregation and clustering will also be discussed.