Winter Road Maintenance
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Winter road and highway maintenance is a service which is often misunderstood. The removal of snow and ice from road surfaces is clearly essential. However, because of yearly seasonal variability, highway maintenance agencies continuously risk being either under prepared or over prepared. Correspondingly, these same agencies are also frequently accused of either neglecting their responsibility or allocating financial resources unwisely. In addition, the practice of salting is strongly associated with several negative environmental and, possibly, health effects. Compounding these public relations and liability problems is the fact that winter maintenance often involves long hours spent in the worse kinds of weather. Obviously, roadway snow and ice clearance is a tough job. It may be facilitated though by careful planning. Moreover, the implementation of technological innovations such as roadway sensors, thermal maps, and weather radar may make operations more efficient. Such measures are certain to preclude some of the difficulties recently experienced in New England. Within the United States, there are over 135 million registered motor vehicles, as well as about 4 million miles of roads and streets. With so many people depending on motor vehicles for transportation, government must be prepared to deal with adverse conditions. Winter weather can not only hurt area economies, it represents a major hazard to road safety as well (Kuemel, 199
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edesign should be considered if less than 65%); (d) call-out index (i.e., relates callouts to weather and generally has a target range); (e) labor efficiency (i.e., relates hours booked to total miles salted); (f) fleet size and capacity (i.e., may be based on 100 salting miles of primary route and units per route); and (g) rate of spread (i.e., grams/square meter achieved: 10 gm/m2 for precautionary salting, 20-40 gm/m2 immediately prior or during snow, and 40-60 gm/m2 for snow removal) (Pearson, 1990, pp. 345-348).
In addition, budget provisions can also be defended by considering the overall economic implications of the service. Obviously, in scaling back an operation, there will be a point at which cost-savings fail to keep up with additional expenses incurred (i.e., the cost of traffic accidents, etc.). Sometimes it is appropriate to try to establish this point.
In plan implementation, agencies are constantly faced with the burden of having either under prepared or over prepared. It is essential, then, that operations and operations superintendents be--above all else--flexible. Despite job's difficulty though, great satisfaction may be obtained from providing a direct, high profile service to the community (Pearson, 19
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 5900
Approximate Pages = 24 (250 words per page)
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