A Holistic Approach Weighing Up the Pros and Cons of Winter Road Maintenance Operations: A State-of-Art Review

Heavy snow and freezing rain hit essential parts of highway networks in winter time, bringing mobility to a halt, and causing chaos and major disruptions to the road transport. Understanding the role that deicing practices and deicers play in winter road maintenance operations underscores the concordant importance of protecting transportation infrastructures and the environment. To this end, this paper aims to provide a thorough review of the existing literature and to gather prominent findings elucidating the impact of each technique and agent commonly employed in snow-fighting. Findings from previous studies revealed that, in most cases, the chloride salts-driven deteriorations provided a particularly stark example of the difficult-to reverse and unpredictable hazards to highway structures, the ecosystem and, in turn, human life. It is therefore vital to select and apply the right type and amount of deicing materials in the right place at the right time. More specifically, past scholarly work suggested that the use of chlorides should be strictly regulated, optimized and diminished by at least 50% to recover the current conjuncture. On the other hand, the adverse effects of other approaches, particularly the contribution of winter service vehicles employed in mechanical snow and ice removal to greenhouse gas emission, air pollution and climate change should not be underestimated. As this critical environmental issue has not been systematically investigated in any other reviews to date, future endeavors should address this research gap regarding the cold-climate regions overburdened by fossil-fuel reliant vehicles in snow and ice clearing. Solving this problem could promote mechanical snow clearing and lead to more extensive applications. Building upon previous literature, the purpose of this paper is to identify further research gaps in snow-fighting and to lay the groundwork for future works. Hence, this study is an attempt to incentivize policymakers and key stakeholders in transportation engineering to discover chloride salt-free deicing sources, eco-friendlier techniques, and sustainable maintenance strategies for winter roads.