Project overview
Bolton & Menk’s Low Salt team has trained tens of thousands of winter maintenance professionals that have explained their frustration with critical infrastructure. When prompted, operators with any experience often point out areas in their operations which demand more salt, then point to features of the designed landscape which exacerbate winter hazards. These experiences share common themes including types of intersections, the grade of land above a superelevated surface, the width of pedestrian ramps, catch points for blowing snow, deep shading caused by barriers or vegetation, restrictive options for storing snow, and more. We seek to find patterns, common combinations of factors, among the problems areas maintenance professionals identify. This research and data collection will investigate the key elements of infrastructure design that conflict with storm-driven winter pavement recovery or lead to repeated snow or meltwater re-entering the maintenance area. We strive to find common winter design problems, opening the door to broadly useful solutions, to improve the designs of the future and ensure the information be shared widely and implemented where appropriate.
Research questions
- Can surveying and interviewing winter maintenance professionals reveal patterns in the designed/built environment (developed sites, transportation corridors, etc.) that hinder efficient salt use or non-salt management practices?
- Can the patterns recognized by survey and interview be characterized, measured, and organized in list format, as “problem areas” and/or “problem characteristics”?
- What strategies may be considered to improve winter performance of the identified problem areas/characteristics?
- What research directions can be identified to develop promising solutions (primarily by design, possibly by modifications to maintenance operations) for the problem characteristics identified in this study?
Key innovations/contributions
This project aims to identify site or corridor characteristics that are linked to a high demand for deicing materials.
What does this mean for Minnesota?
We propose to study problem areas identified by winter maintenance experts working in transportation corridors and developed sites because we want to find out if common combinations of problematic design factors exacerbate the need for salt use in order to understand design practices that may impact the demand for deicers so that design engineers, planners, landscape architects, and stormwater managers might develop approaches for structural pollution prevention practices to control winter maintenance materials.