Selection Table Development for Bridge Railing

Abstract

Although six test levels have been available for 20 years to develop a longitudinal barrier, guidelines on how to choose bridge railings on the basis of specific site and traffic conditions have not been developed that take advantage of the range of crash-tested bridge railing hardware. The research reported in this paper was performed to develop such guidelines. During the guidelines’ development, several important issues emerged that quantified how the site, traffic, and cost characteristics of a project site should be characterized. This paper presents the issues and discusses the applied solutions. A sample set of bridge rail selection tables is presented with use of the solutions discussed, and the sample is compared with bridge railing selection tables documented in the literature. Although the specific example discussed in this paper involves the selection of bridge railings on the basis of site and traffic conditions, the same procedure can be used to develop most other roadside safety selection and location tables.