Engineering Commons^™

Accidents At Median Crossovers, Gordon R. Garner

Kentucky Transportation Center Research Report

Safety improvements are often controversial subjects, especially when the subject is highways. Judgments must be made weighing lives and injuries against the hard realities of financing the construction and maintenance of highway systems. Median crossovers on rural and urban freeways and expressways are controversial design features. State police and maintenance forces claim that median crossovers are necessary and essential for their work and that more frequent location of crossovers is desirable. Engineers involved with highway safety maintain that crossovers create accidents, are not necessary, and should be eliminated. When working on an accident study evaluating median type, it became obvious …