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In recent years, many states have experienced heavy burdens on their snow and ice control budgets. Increases in winter/spring precipitation results in increased costs to state DOTs for winter roadway maintenance materials (salt, sand, chemicals, etc.), plow operator time, equipment maintenance and replacement budgets, and fuel use. As state DOTs adjust to climate conditions that include not only more precipitation, but more severe and unpredictable weather events, it will become increasingly important to integrate the cost of roadway snow and ice control (RSIC) operations into their capital-project planning processes. The overall goal of this project was to support state DOTs’ operations & maintenance efforts by developing an automated method for quantifying the expected impact that new capital projects will have on RSIC operations. The effects of a new suburban roadway were found to be the most significant, requiring 266 vehicle-minutes of travel along with almost 40 minutes of additional service time or one additional fleet truck for each mile of new roadway. The results and findings of this research have implications for short-term funding allocations for RSIC operations staff and for long-term consideration of RSIC in the highway planning and design processes. The findings of this project provide defensible data for operations staff to advocate for increases in funding to offset the increased RSIC burden when a project is completed. The calculation tool created incorporates all of the results above into a MS Excel decision support platform, providing quick estimates of the monetary impact of a variety of major highway project types.

Well-­designed winter maintenance routes result in snow and ice control service that is both more effective, because roads are cleared more rapidly, and more cost-­efficient, because deadheading, route overlap and other inefficiencies are reduced or eliminated. There are an increasing number of computerized tools to facilitate the routing process, but these tools are not yet widely used by winter maintenance practitioners. The purpose of this report is to provide practitioners with an overview of computerized route optimization processes and concrete recommendations about how to ensure that route improvement efforts produce actionable results. Recommendations are synthesized from nine recent and ongoing snowplow routing projects using a variety of computerized routing tools. Project descriptions, based on interviews with project personnel, focus on project goals, optimization software features used, and lessons learned. Multiple route optimization projects report route length reductions on the order of 5% to 10%, with reductions as high as 50% reported in one case. These snowplow route optimization projects show that route optimization is a powerful tool for improving routing efficiency but that it does not replace the need for expert judgment in the route design process. Successful route optimization projects rely on close cooperation between experienced winter maintenance professionals and the individuals conducting the route optimization as well as a highly accurate, snowplow-­routing specific representation of the road network. Successful projects also include time to review and revise new routes to identify potential problem spots prior to implementation.