AASHTO-AGC-ARTBA Joint Committee
Subcommittee on New Highway Materials
Task Force 13 Report

A Guide to Standardized Highway Barrier Hardware

ONLINE HARDWARE GUIDE - USE & BENEFITS

Use of this Guide

This guide supersedes the 1995 publication A Guide to Standardized Highway Barrier Rail Hardware, published jointly by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), the American Road and Transportation Builder's Association (ARTBA) and the Association of General Contractors (AGC). This Guide contains drawings and specifications for roadside safety appurtenances. Essentially all the systems shown in this Guide have been crash tested in accordance with the recommendations of NCHRP Report 350,¹  the most recently published test and
evaluation criteria for roadside hardware. The components and systems included in this Guide are a representative sample of what is used throughout the United States but there are many perfectly adequate designs that were not included. The designs included are the ones thought to be most widely used and therefore the most logical systems and components for standardization. No one State uses all the hardware in this Guide and many States use systems and components that differ somewhat from the details shown herein. Proprietary items are included in this Guide for the convenience of users. The inclusion of a proprietary item does not confer or imply any approval by AASHTO, ARTBA, AGC or the FHWA. The proprietary materials were provided by the manufacturers so users should satisfy themselves as to the accuracy and appropriateness of the information. This document is provided as a Guide, and States may modify particular details to suit their own specific requirements.

Users of the materials in this Guide should take care to use each barrier system appropriately. A roadside barrier must work within the limitations of the site. A number of documents have been published that address specific issues related to the selection, placement and maintenance of traffic barriers. The most recent of these guides is the Roadside Design Guide published by AASHTO in 2002.

Benefits of the Guide

All members of the roadside safety community, be they State engineers, manufacturers of hardware, installation contractors, or researchers, agree on the need to standardize the materials and components that make up roadside safety appurtenances. This was the original objective of AASHTO, ARTBA, and AGC when they formed Task Force 13 in the late 1960s. A Guide to Standardized Highway Barrier Rail Hardware was first published in 1971, supplemented in 1973, and extensively revised in 1979 and 1995. These documents have served an important role in providing transportation agencies, barrier component manufacturers and barrier developers with a consistent set of specifications that can be used to obtain and design hardware elements for barrier systems. The 1979 and 1995 versions have been widely used throughout the United States and Canada as well as in parts of Europe and Asia.

For the various professions involved with designing, purchasing and installing roadside safety hardware, numerous benefits may be realized from using this Guide:

• Administrators
  • Economy in both new construction and maintenance operations.
  • Improved availability of parts permitting faster opening and returning of roads to full operation.
• Designers
  • Readily available details and specifications for parts for many common barrier systems in UCS and SI dimensions.
  • Catalog of easily obtained and economical components for design of new barrier systems.
• Maintenance Personnel
  • Reduced repair time and reduced inventory of replacement parts because of interchangeability of parts and their greater availability from suppliers nationwide.

¹ H.E. Ross, Jr., D.L. Sicking, R.A. Zimmer, and J.D. Michie, Recommended Procedures for the Safety Performance Evaluation of Highway Features, National Cooperative Highway Research Program, Report No. 350, Washington, D.C., 1993.