Bridges

Inconsistency in the design of traffic barriers for bridges has been identified as a major issue in current practice throughout Australia and New Zealand. The need for standardised solutions has been recognised by road jurisdictions, consultants, and contractors. The main areas of concern are the determination of appropriate barrier performance levels, structural design criteria, the lack of standard barrier design details, guidance on retrofitting existing bridge barriers, bridge approach barriers and overpass bridge support protection.

To address this, Austroads commissioned a review of the Austroads Standardised Bridge Barrier Design Report (AP-R445-13) based on current research, guidance, and standards. Additionally, one objective of the project was to verify compliance of bridge barrier designs and guidelines against the relevant Australian Standards that have been recently updated, and the American Association of Highway and Transportation Officials Manual for Assessing Safety Hardware. To achieve this, a comprehensive literature review was undertaken, full scale crash testing was conducted, and Finite Element Modelling was developed and calibrated.

The main output from this project is the updated Austroads Standardised Bridge Barrier Design Guidelines, which includes key aspects such as bridge barrier design procedures and considerations; bridge barrier performance level selection; barrier length of need; consideration for barriers in bridge medians; retrofitting of existing bridge barriers; bridge approach barriers and bridge support protection barriers. This paper covers the literature review, finite element analysis and crash test results, and project outcomes.