Tim Corbin
The Road Zipper System
Written for the 2nd IRF Asia Regional Congress & Exhibition
The Road Zipper System® from Lindsay Transportation Solutions is a moveable barrier technology for managed lanes and construction applications. Moveable barrier is used to create “Safe, Dynamic Highways” that offer real-time road configuration while maintaining positive barrier protection between lanes. For managed lane facilities, moveable barrier is used in areas where there is a tidal traffic flow to redistribute unused capacity from the off-peak traffic direction to give more lanes to peak traffic. For construction, moveable barrier accelerates the construction process by combining or eliminating stages, improving traffic flow to significantly reduce user delay costs.
At Lindsay Transportation Solutions, our mission is to provide worldwide solutions for mitigating traffic congestion, increasing safety, accelerating road works, and creating managed lanes facilities. We provide the flexibility to reconfigure traffic lanes on highways, arterials, and urban streets with the additional protection of concrete barrier separation between opposing traffic lanes. This allows our customers to move more people through the facility and reduce user delay costs wherever possible while eliminating the potential for head-on collisions.
There are two main types of Managed Lanes facilities that can be created with moveable barrier: moveable medians and contraflow lanes. The moveable median is most commonly applied to bridges and other highways with few center structures. In this case, there is no fixed barrier on the highway, and the moveable barrier is the only barrier. The barrier is moved back and forth multiple times per day to reconfigure the roadway based on the needs of peak traffic. There are also many cases where a single moveable median barrier is not practical. In these cases, two moveable walls are used, one on each side of the roadway. The barrier is moved out on the off-peak side to create a contraflow lane, and vehicles from the peak traffic side can then cross over to the off-peak side to use the newly created additional capacity.
Construction work zones also benefit from moveable barrier. For shoulder and median work, the barrier can be stored at the edge of the road and moved out during off-peak traffic periods to increase the size of the work zone. This allows larger, more efficient equipment into the work zone, accelerating the construction process and combining or eliminating construction stages. The barrier is returned to the stored position during peak traffic periods to give the maximum number of lanes to traffic. During partial closure construction, one side of the road is completely shut down for construction and all traffic is diverted to the other side. Moveable barrier is used as a “moveable median,” shifting multiple times per day to reconfigure the road to give more lanes to the peak traffic direction.
Our recently completed road works project in Japan marked the introduction of The Road Zipper to the Asian continent. We are actively pursuing additional opportunities in the region and our second project in Japan begins October 17th, 2016.
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