"HOW TO PREVENT
ACCIDENTS ON SRINAGAR JAMMU HIGHWAY"
Srinagar Jammu National Highway is the part of National Highway
1A (India) system and connects Srinagar
(Kashmir) with Jammu City. The distance
between Jammu Tawi and Srinagar is 295 km. It is one of the two road links
(other being Mughal road) that connects Kashmir Valley with rest of India. The traffic
on the highway is controlled by two control
rooms, one in Srinagar
and other in Jammu.
Traffic problems are very annoying
or in some cases severely dangerous in India. Road traffic
accidents kill more than 12 million people
and injure more than 50 million people
worldwide every year.
The global annual cost due to RTAs is a whopping
2,30,000 million US dollars.
In India, 1,20,000
people die and 12,70,000 sustain serious injuries
every year in Road Traffic Accidents. There is one death on the Indian road every six minutes and this is expected to rise in future.
The deaths in Jammu and Kashmir,
due to road accidents
on the Jammu- Srinagar Highway were
reported to be 69.6% in 2013.
It is thus extremely important to devise
a network of roads that will not only prevent
these accidents and provide early warnings to the driver to prevent
risky driving but will also contribute to other parameters of road infrastructures: mobility efficiency, environmental performance, advanced traffic control
technology, life-cycle analysis of construction and maintenance costs and energy inputs,
user-oriented designs,
safety and security
performance, and long- term financing
solutions.
At the end of the day, Smart Roads must address the people’s highest expectations in relation to road transport and, in so doing, define a model for a highway
of tomorrow that adapts to
societal demands.
I.
. ATTRIBUTES
OF SMART ROADS
We must distinguish the attributes with a direct influence
on road design, construction
and maintenance.
1) Structural attributes: Smart Roads are associated with structural aspects
such as, although not limited to, the following:
i. Optimal service quality: Through advanced traffic
management it is possible to optimize
the use of existing
road networks, limiting congestion during
hours of peak demand,
and at the same time distributing traffic as evenly as possible
to maximize the service
levels offered at all times.
ii. Economic sustainability: Highways designed
for the mass transport
of people and goods are economically justified in most of the cases.
This principle is all the more important when it comes
to evaluating the cost of operating and maintaining this type of infrastructures. It is therefore
highly advised to proceed
with detailed cost-benefit analyses with a view to justifying
the usefulness of every road
project.
iii. Improved safety: This means following
internationally-recognized best practices in the design of new road infrastructures and in the implementation of the best possible safety solutions - for all users - in the maintenance, upgrading and modernization
of existing
infrastructure.
iv. Coverage of externalities: The external costs arising
from the movement of people and goods on roads must be kept to a minimum through
the development of technologies to absorb emissions and noise, minimize
the probability of and mitigate
the impacts of accidents,
and in addition provide
maximum travel time
in free-flowing traffic.
v. Optimal environmental integration and energy efficiency: This refers to the capacity
of our road systems to respect high environmental protection levels,
minimizing the associated environmental impacts
,developing optimized
models for the lowest possible
energy consumption and emission levels & maximizing the use of recycled and waste materials.
2) Emotional Attributes: It is also possible to identify
a series of emotional
attributes associated with the Smart Roads concept, insofar as they are linked closely to the structural
aspects set out above, notably
i. Reliability: Roads should provide
assurance in terms of predictable travel time and, by extension, free traffic flow for as much of the day as possible.
ii. Safety: Roads should
offer the highest safety levels
that technical and technological progress to date allows, with a view to securing mobility with the lowest possible risk and minimizing the probability of and mitigating
the potential effects of accidents.
iii. Security: Roads should be the most important part of an integrated system managing the risks associated to natural and man-made disasters, and in addition
providing an adequate
response and recovery
time to all kinds of incidents.
iv. Comfort: Good
driving conditions
are an essential parameter for ensuring user satisfaction and must take into account
adequate road visibility and signaling, even pavements and proper services
alongside roads.
v. Modernity: Insofar as no specific model has been defined for every possible
typology for road travel, users do not generally classify roads as an “advanced” transport mode. Making
a distinction between passenger and goods transport, between short, frequent trips and long-haul travel, etc.,
are key challenges to design
a system perceived as modern and attractive by the public opinion.
III.
VISUALISING THE SMART ROADS
igh environmental protection levels,
minimizing the associated environmental impacts
,developing optimized
models for the lowest possible
energy consumption and emission levels & maximizing the use of recycled and waste materials.
I.
DEVELOPING
THE SMART ROAD
Ecotechnic Road System (Ecotechnic Road System
(ERS) is a concept
of an integrated infrastructure, based on the most innovative technologies in order to minimize
globally pollution
and disturbance due to traffic
(noise, vibrations, air and
water pollution). The nuisance mitigating road infrastructure solutions defined as ERS, are composed
by three subsystems: - Pavements subsystem (i.e. resilient, resonant
and reservoir pavements); - Barriers
subsystem (i.e. anti noise, air de pollutant, safety and green barriers); - Auxiliary
subsystem (i.e.
air cleaning unit, ventilation unit, ground catalyzer, photo catalytic material and TiO2 coating).
Noise: different solutions are available in order to reduce noise nuisance
via road pavement and barrier. Optimized solutions reaching
12 dBA can be obtained
with contribution from 3 to 6 dBA from road pavement
and till 8 dBA from barriers.
Pavements: It is recognized that quiet pavement systems develop effective
noise-controlling pavements concentrating on sound absorbing
properties, micro-
and macro-texture
characteristics.
Here, experimental pavements using resilient
and resonant technology (euphonic and ecotechnic types) originally conceived, lab prototipysed
and small &
full scale implemented during SIRUUS
(Silent Roads for Urban and Extra-Urban Use) project taking into account an idea by the Romans 1700 years ago
to control low frequency noise.
-
The resilient type, with "dumping" behaviour, is constituted by a bituminous porous double
layer (2 cm of 0-6mm on 4 cm of 0-16mm) on the light-weight aggregate bituminous mixture road base course
(15 cm of 0-25mm) as energy absorbing semi-porous lower layer in order to decrease
the mechanical impedance reflecting
also on the acoustical
behaviour improvement.
- The euphonic
and ecotechnic types of the SIRUUS
pavement concepts
are variations of the resonant typology
that consists of two layers of porous asphalt (constituted by a porous wearing course 0/6mm and a porous base course 0/16mm)
connected to a concrete road base course with localized
Helmholtz resonators. The third layer can be obtained
also as transition or disconnection layer carried
out by diffused resonant
cavities obtained by light-weight cement mortar.
The Helmholtz
resonators are designed
to absorb noise over the range from 100 to 250 Hz widening the absorption range
of 400 Hz – 1200 Hz carried
out by the double layer at the top.
The Ecotechnic pavement which was originally
developed for street traffic,
is a multi-layer pavement
including a top layer of porous asphalt
0/5mm, a base layer of porous
asphalt 0/24mm, and a metallic panel disconnection layer.
Barriers:
innovative barrier solutions have been developed
-
coupling the traditional anti noise barrier types, eventually with self adaptive height
and inclination with acoustic changing
characteristics by folding
panels, and restrain integrated road safety system,
eventually with dirty avoidable
characteristics by sprayed TiO2 (screen close to source);
-
improving the
performance characteristics trough new materials and/or
structure types as light weight
concrete vertical
panels constructed using expanded
clay as aggregates (novel-shaped noise (barriers &
optimization of acoustic absorption
properties);
-
adding new functions as atmospheric pollution
control/abatement (as active carbon particle) and traffic management
carrying out an active integration in the nuisance mitigating
infrastructure (novel shaped noise barriers & optimization of acoustic absorption properties).
II. OVERCOMING THE PROBLEM
OF ICY ROADS
In order for the system
to be able to warn drivers about
the potential dangers
ahead, such situations need to be identified. There are various
methods for detecting different kinds
of events (e.g. ice on the road,
fog). Two alternative approaches to perform ice-on-road detection optically are introduced in this paper.
The first calculates changes in polarization planes of back-scattered lighting and the second
calculates the amount
of light reflected in the medium infrared band (1000 – 1600 nm). Detection by utilizing
the polarization plane changes of reflected
light. For this reason drivers are also recommended to wear polarized sun glasses in order to minimize
the glare from a puddle or an engine
bonnet. The same phenomenon can be used to detect an icy road by subtracting the horizontally polarized light (Ih) compared
to the vertical (Iv): h v R = I − I.
(1) If the difference (R) is high, it can indicate a reflecting surface, which could be ice. An alternative way of detecting ice on the road is to utilize light detection in the near-infrared band.
The tests presented below
show that ice reflects
light effectively in the 1500 nm band while
snow appears to diminish
the reflection almost completely. The most prominent and robust approach
would be a fusion
of the previously presented
polarization concept
with near infra-red
(NIR) imaging.
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