Study on the effect of surface texture saturation of road pavements with drop on road markings

Road markings contribute greatly towards improving road safety standards. For some time now, manufacturers, researchers and road management authorities have been interested in the development of high-performance products in terms of durability, night-time retroreflection, visibility in wet conditions and more recently, skid resistance. To meet these functional requisites, the latest generation of products for road markings often contain mixtures of glass beads and aggregates, of varying quantities and types, which in many cases involves an appreciable alteration of the skid resistance parameters of road pavements (MTD, PTV), due to the partial saturation of the road surface micro- and macro-texture. This paper reports the results of intensive road monitoring of products with drop on materials for road marking, during which the characteristic road texture parameters were measured and compared, of both asphalt pavement and markings, using the most common international indexes (SFC, SN, IFI) to obtain the specific skid resistance coefficients for each of them. Crossed comparison of the different parameters determined the effect of saturation of the road pavement surface texture caused by the presence of road markings with drop on materials, and also evaluated the decline of performance in terms of skid resistance.