Decelerations of passenger vehicles on gravel arrester beds

Abstract

Gravel-filled arrester beds, also called safety-escape ramps or vehicle run-out areas, have long been a road-safety feature for safely stopping heavy road vehicles from running off the road. In the recent past, there has been consideration given to installing these features on highway access ramps to provide safe areas to stop passenger cars driving at highway speeds. The work presented in this article was performed to investigate the behaviour of standard-size passenger cars on gravel-filled arrester beds, with a particular focus on the achievable vehicle decelerations and the ability of the arrester beds to safely stop a passenger car coasting in an uncontrolled manner. The findings show that the achievable average decelerations are in the range of 0.3 g for coasting vehicles and up to 0.9 g when the vehicles are braking. The results prove that more research is required to quantify the influence of the gravel parameters on the achievable decelerations.