Characterization of Mobile Work Zone Safety in Missouri

Work zones often deviate from normal conditions in terms of geometrics (e.g. lane closure, narrow lanes), striping/markings, signs, and traffic. AMobile Work Zone (MWZ) is a special category of a work zone where the location of the work zone keeps changing, often rapidly. Despite MWZsafety being of great interest to transportation agencies, they have not studied it formally. This paper presents an examination of MWZs andcollisions involving Truck-Mounted Attenuators (TMAs). This examination utilized data fusion of three major databases from Missouri: crashreports, department of transportation claim reports, and MWZ schedules. The fused dataset involved 139 crashes from 2012-2017. The areas ofinterest included initial impact location, contributing factors, third-party versus employee fault, vehicle type, work zone activity, seasonality, speedlimit, time of day, collision lane, and work train configuration. The majority of the crashes were the fault of third parties (>80%) anddistraction/inattentiveness was the largest contributory factor (66%). Public outreach and education should emphasize on the difficulty in providingearly warnings of MWZs. There is a significant percentage of crashes involving lane changing (39.2%) and even collision of the middle TMAtruck (21.8%). Thus, it is important for the public to understand that an entire work train is an integral unit. Higher speed limit dominated MWZcrashes (>75%), even though they only represented 3.6% of the MWZs scheduled. The results of this study on MWZs provide some foundation forother researchers to pursue statistical modeling, assuming that a larger database of MWZ crashes could be developed.