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Converting Paved Roads to Unpaved Roads

Availability Status: Archived

Description/Learning Outcomes:

The National Center for Rural Road Safety (Safety Center) and the Center for Environmentally Sustainable Transportation in Cold Climates (CESTiCC) co-hosted a FREE, 1.5-hour online webinar. 

Webinar Description
This webinar provided an overview of the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Synthesis 485 Converting Paved Roads to Unpaved. The webinar presented the contents of the synthesis report which summarizes the state-of-the-practice of the road conversion process, tools that can be used to aid in the decision making process of whether to convert from paved to unpaved including available resources and design guides, and what has worked and what has not worked for those in the unpaving process including public outreach and identified impacts.

Webinar Outcomes
At the conclusion of this webinar, participants were able to:

  • Summarize the process of converting roads from paved to unpaved,
  • Identify information sources to aid in the decision making process of whether a road is a candidate for unpaving,
  • Distinguish between practices that can improve the success of road conversions from paved to unpaved versus practices that may reduce the success, and
  • Identify why roads are being converted from paved to unpaved.

 Target Audience
This training was directed towards a very broad safety audience including, but not limited to, law enforcement, planners, engineers, first responders, elected officials, public health, tourism agencies, and safety culture experts. Participants should have some basic familiarity with transportation safety.

Course Presenters 

Ken Skorseth, South Dakota LTAP and South Dakota State University (Retired)

  • Ken was a Program Manager for South Dakota LTAP and lead author on many key low volume roads documents including the Gravel Road Construction and Maintenance Guide, is now happily retired.

Laura Fay, WTI

  • Laura is a Research Scientist at the Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University, Program Manager of the Winter Maintenance & Effects research group, and Associate Director of the Center for Environmentally Sustainable Transportation in Cold Climates (CESTiCC) University Transportation Center (UTC).

David Jones, University of California, Davis

  • David is the Associate Director of the University of California Pavement Research Center at UC Davis.  He also Chairs the Transportation Research Board’s Standing Committee on Low Volume Roads.