New episodes of the Talkin’ Winter Ops podcast
Check out the most recent episode of the Talkin’ Winter Ops podcast!
New Resources
New Clear Roads Research: Leveraging the Deicing Benefits of Solar Radiation
To help winter maintenance managers understand how sunlight affects melt rates, prioritize vegetation management, and communicate the benefits of roadside vegetation management to the public, this Clear Roads project produced a vegetation management guide.
Winter Maintenance at the 2026 TRB Meeting
Clear Roads has prepared a listing of technical sessions and posters related to winter maintenance that were presented at the 2026 Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting. The list includes links to more than two dozen papers and posters on a wide range of winter maintenance topics, including materials, equipment, technology, and performance management.
New Clear Roads Research: Quantifying the Value of Winter Operations
This Clear Roads project developed a tool that states can use to quantify the economic value of their snow-and-ice programs.
New Clear Roads Research: Comparing Salt Brine and Granular Salt for Safety and Performance
In this Clear Roads project, researchers developed metrics for comparing the two different forms of salt and conducted a variety of tests to measure their performance.
New Clear Roads Research: Incorporating Pavement Friction Data into Operational Decisions
Real-time information about a pavement’s surface can help transportation agencies ensure roads have adequate traction and salt is applied only where it’s needed. This Clear Roads project evaluated roadway grip data as a viable source for informing winter maintenance operations, and developed models that use the data to identify the need for salt applications.
New Clear Roads Meeting Materials Posted
Clear Roads held its fall business meeting last month in Bloomington, Minnesota from September 16-18.
Clear Roads Research is Now a Provisional Test Method
The Mechanical Rocker Test method, originally developed by Nebraska DOT more than a decade ago, was validated through Clear Roads research project 18-06 as a low-cost and repeatable method for determining the efficacy of liquid deicers. As a result of this work, all transportation agencies can objectively compare deicers on the market.
New Clear Roads Synthesis Report: Managing Videos and Images
This recently completed Clear Roads synthesis project surveyed member states and other winter maintenance professionals and reviewed relevant literature to help transportation agencies implement effective policies and best practices for properly managing video and image data.
New Clear Roads Synthesis Report: Drones and Winter Maintenance
This new Clear Roads synthesis project surveyed maintenance professionals and reviewed published literature to identify opportunities in winter maintenance operations that could benefit from this emerging technology.