Analysis and Evaluation of Technical Criteria Related To Field Tests of Concrete Road Guards

Roadway departure crashes, especially on high-speed rural roads, tend to be severe if the roadside exposes occupants of errant vehicles to excessive injury hazard. Unforgiving roadside features, along with the lack of proper safety treatment, contribute to undesirable crash outcomes, particularly the severe injuries and frequent deaths that result from collisions between dangerous roadside elements or opposite-direction vehicles and this is important in all countries of the world. Therefore, the use of road barriers has widened during the last several years and the structural performance of road barriers can be best accessed through full-scale crash tests. Safety barriers are currently designed for different performance levels, which are set according to current CEN and MASH-NCHRP 350 performance standards. In this paper, the criteria and differences of these standards in crash testing are evaluated and examined. The results of this limited study show that although these standards are the same in the technology to perform the tests, criteria, data acquisition, and performance evaluation, these standards are too different to be used as a single standard and require the design of additional tests to resolve the dispute and their performance under in-service conditions must also be considered.