Guard Rail Safety – What’s the Right Height to Keep You Safe?

Have you ever thought about the purpose of a guard rail? These metal barriers are meant to help keep you from the peril that could await you on the other side and ensure you don’t end up careening down a cliff or hillside which could mean even more damage to your vehicle. The challenge to a guardrail is the fact that it needs to be set at a specific height in order to make sure you can stay safe in case you hit the rail when your vehicle is out of control due to a malfunction of some sort.

Guard Rail Safety

This safety feature that’s attached to the road and is set at a height that works well for most vehicles, but it’s been studied at length for a variety of reasons in order to figure out which height would be best. The challenge is that guardrails have to be set at a level that would make it possible for you to keep from rolling over the guardrail and ending up rolling down the hill on the other side. Currently, guardrails are set at a height of 31 inches from the ground, but a recent study found this isn’t the safest height at all.
A team from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has studied the safety, the purpose and the effects guard rails have on the traffic and the ability to keep you safe with some conclusions. The study found that different heights were ideal for guard rails than what’s currently being used. During the study, the team crashed several vehicles into rails that were set at a variety of heights. The results are that guardrails should be set at 36 inches in order to keep more vehicles from rolling over and becoming further damaged in the process of a crash that’s out of control.
While this new guard rail height might eventually become a standard for the industry, it also requires precision in installation. This new and safer height is one that will help make sure you can remain safer when driving, but a simple one-inch change in the height to 37 inches would cause more damage than it would save. This taller height would cause vehicles to drive under the guard rail, which then means much more damage and the potential for the guardrail to stop doing its job and end up causing much more damage than what you would have at the 36-inch height.
Whether the guard rail is moved up to the 36-inch height or the industry standard of 31 continues to be used is going to depend on the reaction and application of these results. Obviously, it could take a lot of work for the guardrails to be moved up across the nearly four million miles of roads in the US, but this would be the proper action to make them safer for everyone on the road. Either way, it seems the guard rails we currently have on the sides of the roads just might be a bit too low, especially if you drive a taller vehicle.