Theses and Dissertations Collection

Pavement markings assist drivers in navigating rural highways especially during night time. For this study, white waterborne pavement marking retroreflectivity data was collected on two lane rural highways in Idaho and then compared to an accelerated lab test using pavement slabs. Retroreflectivity readings were taken for thirty-eight test sites with six-inch markings and thirty-eight control sites with four-inch markings. The relationship between the field data over the course of one year and the accelerated lab data was linked by comparing the number of traffic passes in the field to the number of passes from the three-wheel polisher device in the lab. In order to establish this relationship, a pneumatic, steel, and pneumatic with scraper blade wheel conditions were run in the lab to correlate the field data with the normalized ground snow loads for each traffic district in Idaho. A logarithmic relationship was determined for waterborne pavement markings in the lab and field. Finally, crash data was analyzed for both the test and control sites to examine the crash rates of the white waterborne pavement markings. It was found that the wider pavement markings did slightly improve the safety of the rural highways in Idaho.