Study On Function And Width Of Expressway Hard Shoulder

Along with our country’s rapid economic growth and infrastructure investment vigorously,expressway has achieved rapid development.China’s highway traffic safety situation remainedstable generally, the high incidence situation of highway traffic accidents keep within limits,but there are still some outstanding problems. As a important part of highway cross section,hard shoulder plays an irreplaceable role on road safety and function. Considering theeconomy, environment and design concept and other factors, a narrow hard shoulder or noneof hard shoulder is adopted by some expressway, and it has caused frequently-occuring trafficaccidents in our country.The core functions of expressway hard shoulder are providing a place for fault vehicle totemporarily emergency stop and lateral safety distance. The large freight trucks account forabout50%of the traffic composition in our country, because of its wide body, low powerperformance, there is a negative influence of the traffic flow and traffic safety greatly when itstops on the hard shoulder, and the traffic accidents caused by large vehicles are more serious,thus giving the width of hard shoulder should take into consider the influence of these factors.Based on the domestic and foreign highway hard shoulder’s function and the width aresummarized, on the main function and mechanism of hard shoulder are analyzed, the differentfunction and the width orientation relationship, and summarizes the engineering measures ofpreventing the vehicle running on the hard shoulder, ensure the hard shoulder function.Thispaper focuses on the the hard shoulder width of core function, based on field experimentinvestigation, combined with the highway traffic organization and management, thepsychological characteristics of drivers, the different characteristics of left and right hardshoulder, a mathematical model of left and right hard shoulder’s width on the core function isestablished on experimental data, mathematical statistics, regression analysis, and put forwardthe general and the minimum width of hard shoulder to meet the needs of different function.