Innovation Database

• Maintenance operations

By using an Inter Agency Agreement, Caltrans coordinates with the California Highway Patrol (CHP) to utilize officers on site at highway maintenance projects. MAZEEP is used to reduce the potential for traffic collisions, reduce traffic speeds to the posted speed limits, and to increase safety of the workers and motorists by influencing drivers to maintain their speed reductions through work zones and its potential for identification of DUI’s. MAZEEP is also used to increase the safety of workers in roadside activities such as encampment abatement, litter removal, and guardrail repair.

The Caltrans Division of Research and Innovation conducted a study on the effectiveness of MAZEEP.

This research showed that a significant proportion of vehicles were traveling above the speed limit within a work zone in both urban and rural highways in California, creating a high risk situation for the road construction and maintenance workers. Deployment of four levels of police presence were studied to determine their effectiveness in improving traffic conditions. Hypothesis testing was performed using aggregated speed data collected in the field to assess whether these different levels of police presence were able to provide meaningful safety improvements in terms of four Measures of Effectiveness. In terms of average speed reduction, the data indicated that the standard taper without any police presence provided some speed reductions. The addition of CHP-CMS and CHP-CMS with passive police
vehicle in the urban environment both resulted in additional speed reductions, which were statistically significant. The deployment of passive police in rural environments resulted mostly in further speed reductions that were statistically significant.

(Speeding in highway work zone: An Evaluation of methods of speed control Bahram Ravani, Chao Wang Advanced Highway Maintenance and Construction Technology Research Center (AHMCT), University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, 95616, United States)