than I should be.
Maybe, I don’t have a lot of experience driving in winter conditions, but I feel like most of us have let road safety fall by the wayside. We invent ways to make cell phones and cars safer, but when was the last time anyone has heard a breaking development from the Department of Transportation?
My mother has been driving for 40 years or so, and last Thursday, she was in a major incident while driving home from work in Rhode Island. Her normal commute to home takes about 15 minutes or so. During the snowstorm, there were barely any plow trucks out and cars were stuck on I-95 for seven hours — little kids stuck on buses, cars running out of gas and cars in ditches. Peter Martin, who is 7 years old, was stuck on his school bus for two and a half hours.
So, what improvements can we make on the roadways to have a safer experience? According to roadwaysafety.org, there have been some changes
already that we may not even realize. The advance in meteorology, for example, helps road managers determine what the pavement temperature is. This way, they can deploy road crews and plow trucks when the snow and ice sticks to the ground and not waste supplies, time and money before it is necessary.
The internet is also a valuable tool that we take for granted. Live web cams overlooking highways like the ones that WMTW provides on its website give motorists a look at the roads before they decide to go out. Also, the “511” road signs you see on the highway are excellent to use. I called and had access to up to the minute reports on the traffic for any given city in Maine.
But, even with all of this stuff, we are still at a very high risk to drive in adverse conditions.
In my opinion, we could have much more advanced tools to make it easier to get around. We could develop heated pavement to use on U.S. roads that are
traveled the most. Some of the wealthiest people already have their sidewalks heated so they don’t have to shovel. We could make this a national priority. There would be less cost of plows and supplies, and less snow and ice to worry about.
If that isn’t possible, maybe we could invent lights on our cars that produce heat that would melt ice and snow while driving. We could attempt to create a chemical that, when reacting to the cold temps and ice, automatically begins the melting process much better than the salt we currently use.
We could make proactive alerts, such as signs on the road that would judge the conditions nearby and close down the road if necessary and alert road crews and police. It could use infrared technology to scan the area for accidents and ice, and measure snowfall and react accordingly. This would help forecast weather and divert traffic away from the hazard. If we put as much effort into the advancement of roadwork technology as we put in for the advancement in the next cell phone, there would be less accidents and better drivers on the roads.