Special Guardrails to Contain and Redirect Large Trucks and Buses: An Italian Project

In Italy, the notable increase in serious road accidents caused by freight vehicles has accentuated the need to renew radically the design of safety structures.

Recent programs to enlarge the major freeway network, however, have permitted experimentation of new types of guardrails, providing the stimulus to organize the road platform in new ways, better adapted to the current reality and capable of reducing the more harmful effects of serious collisions on vehicle occupants.

This report thus describes certain solutions proposed for the arrangement of the median and the borders of bridges, exploiting the “ductility” characteristics of certain materials (e.g. soil) in combination with certain other technical devices suggested for bridge guardrails, in the attempt to improve the compatibility between the vehicles (especially heavy vehicles) and the characteristics of the infrastructure.