Transition from guardrail to concrete bridge rail for low-speed roadways
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In recent years, many state departments of transportation have had to modify their approach guardrail-to-concrete bridge rail transition systems to comply with the testing requirements of NCHRP Report 350. Generally, these transition systems are designed and tested for use on high-speed roadways. Because no national transition designs have been developed and tested for lower-speed conditions, the same transition standard is typically applied to all roadways regardless of speed. The new transition designs represent a significant increase in installation cost and complexity over some previous designs that were acceptable under NCHRP Report 230. Thus, it may be cost-prohibitive to require use of the same design on all roadways. The purpose of this research was to develop a guardrail-to-concrete bridge rail transition that is suitable for use on lower-speed roadways and that is less expensive and complex than current designs for high-speed roadways. A low-cost transition was successfully evaluated under NCHRP Report 350 Test Level 2 (TL-2) impact conditions. It is considered suitable for use on roadways that have traffic conditions appropriate for the use of TL-2 safety hardware. Use of this system provides significant savings in material and installation cost compared with high-speed (i.e., TL-3) transitions.
