AWP Safety, which claims it supports more than 1 million work zones each year, often receives little advance notice before its traffic control crews are needed on a work site, with some requests arriving late in the day for work beginning the following morning.
During a webinar on “What Safety Readiness Requires Now,” Thomas Kratt, AWP Safety’s senior vice president of operations, and Michelle Marsh, AWP Safety’s senior vice president of environmental, health and safety, stressed how this needed to change. Kratt advocated for involving traffic control teams in the planning phases of projects to develop individualized safety plans that better protects road workers.
“Just to make sure this hits home. This late planning means we often end up with a standardized traffic control plan as opposed to job specific,” Marsh said. “And we know how important that job specific plan is. We take into account things like weather, the number of cars that are coming through your zone; things that we can't account for when we're just pulling a plan out of a standardized book.”
When notifications of work come in on such short notice, AWP Safety is unable to develop a site-specific traffic control plan. A plan individualized to the needs of the job site can better protects road workers while reducing intrusions and near-misses within the work zone.
During the webinar, AWP Safety advocated for traffic control to be included in the project design phase—the very first phase of the project—as opposed to when the company is usually called in during the final phases, when workers are setting up the work zone.
The difference is a shift from reactive to proactive traffic control planning.
When AWP Safety is only contacted during later project phases, it must use a standardized traffic control plan that does not account for the many changing factors of the job site. The team comes prepared for the simplest of jobs and brings in additional resources as needed.
Proactive planning ensures a job site has the appropriate traffic control for the work being conducted. Having the right-sized setup can improve efficiency and control costs while making the job site safer.
A lack of planning can also lead to traffic control teams sending too few or too many employees and resources, resulting in additional costs for unnecessary personnel or wait times while additional crews are dispatched to the site.
With ample planning time, AWP Safety can send a crew member to evaluate the site and surrounding traffic. This allows the company to provide contractors with an estimate for the cost of traffic control, as well as potential savings.
In one case, the company was able to reduce traffic control costs from 10% of the total construction budget to 2%, according to Kratt.
Ultimately, bringing traffic control providers into a project early allows contractors to move beyond one-size-fits-all plans and prepare for the realities of each work zone. That proactive approach can reduce delays and unnecessary costs while giving crews the site-specific protection they need before work begins.
