Highway Work Zone Safety Audits at the Construction Stage

The nation’s highways are in need of extensive maintenance and reconstruction work. High traffic demand requires state and local transportation agencies to consider practical strategies for minimizing a work zone’s impacts on the traveling public and construction workers. Work zone safety audit is a proactive tool to serve the purpose. This paper presents the guidelines for highway work zone safety audits at the construction stage. After a brief description of the key features of work zone safety audit, an eight-step audit process is presented. Then, the article focuses on the five key audit tasks which are performed in the audit process including pre-audit reviews, audit meetings, audit field inspections, audit analyses and audit recommendations. Finally, a case study is introduced to show the proposed guidelines.