This abstract will: • Identify the organization or the individual being nominated; • Outline what activity or initiative was undertaken to benefit road safety; • Demonstrate innovation in the initiative; and • Describe the overall applicability of the activity, technique or concept to transportation. The Province of Ontario takes great pride in the quality of its transportation facilities. The movement of people and goods throughout Ontario is fundamental and essential to the province’s economy. To support its mandate, the province and MTO make substantial investments in highway improvements and in operating its highways with a goal of providing the safest and most efficient facilities it can. Despite these investments, the fact remains that weather, and in particular adverse winter weather, continues to challenge both drivers and the operating authorities. Although the most recent Ontario statistics are not immediately available to us, the FHWA has stated that “each year there are approximately 1.57 million weather related crashes” and that “about 25% of the non-recurring delays on freeways are due to weather; total system delay is 1 billion hours per year; weather affects about 1/3 of the national GDP and chemical anti-icing and de-icing accounts for roughly 1/3 of the expenditures for snow and ice control.” MTO has over last decade, successfully developed and implemented a broad portfolio of scalable countermeasures to deal with winter weather and the resulting driving conditions. The Ministry’s approach has been to attack the problem on all levels, with a range of countermeasures addressing the network as a whole, specific corridors and finally at socalled hot spots or higher-risk locations. The Ministry has been on the leading edge of the development and deployment of supporting technologies and in methods of procuring winter maintenance services.
