San José, Alajuela and Heredia are the provinces that have the greatest number of roads with the worst surface conditions.
According to the latest Road Network Assessment Report from the National Laboratory of Structural Materials and Models (Lanamme), when analyzing the condition of the regularity index, through which the comfort that drivers perceive when traveling on the roads is determined, these three provinces add greater stretches with poor and very poor conditions.
In the case of San José, of the 763 km evaluated, it was determined that 293 km (41%) were in poor condition and 95 km in very poor condition (13%), only 72 km were in good condition and the remaining 303 km were classified as regular.
The provinces of GAM and Guanacaste had the greatest number of km of road in conditions of poor functionality.
READ MORE: 1,200 km of national routes are in poor condition
In Alajuela, the total of routes evaluated was 1,001 km of which only 86 km (8.5%) fell into the good category, while 234 km (23%) were classified as poor and 35 as very poor. The rest were considered to be in fair condition.
The report also highlights the case of Carthage, where there was not a single km of national routes classified as in good condition. 193 km were detected in fair condition, 98 km in poor condition and 15 km in terrible condition.
Under those same criteria, Heredia tIt also turned out to be one of the provinces with the highest percentage of routes in poor conditions (46%). In total, 39 km of the 264 km that were evaluated were in poor condition and 84 km in poor condition, while 88 km were assessed as fair and 51 km as good.
According to the analysis, the regular condition that prevails in all provinces is an indicator that the maintenance management strategy is similar throughout the country.
International studies cited in the Lanamme report directly relate the regularity index to the operating costs and vehicle maintenance, as well as pollution levels.
Most dangerous routes
Another of the parameters evaluated by the Lanamme was the slip resistance condition of pavements on national roads, which corresponds to the surface grip that vehicles can have at a specific time.
In that section, the condition of 2,373 km of roads could only be measured since the devices used for this purpose can only be used on pavements in good condition. Under this criterion, the roads in the provinces of Cartago and Heredia They are the ones with the smallest number of sections evaluated.
The risks of accidents increase in sections with the worst grip conditions on the pavement and intensify under external factors such as rain. (Rafael Pacheco Granados)
Puntarenas was the province where it was possible to analyze the largest number of paved roads with a total of 619 km, of which 229 km were classified as very slippery and 303 as a slider. The second province with the highest number of risk sections was Alajuela, where it was determined that of the 560 km assessed, 200 km were in very slippery condition and 240 km as slippery.
In San José it was found that of the 305 km evaluated, 128 km were found to be very slippery and 136 km were under the sliding parameter, while in Guanacaste 160 km were found to be in the highest risk condition and 194 km in the sliding state.
The province of Limón was the one that showed the highest percentage of routes in better condition within this criterion, since 104 km were found to be “slightly slippery” and only 32 km were found to be very slippery.
According to the count made by the experts, the results showed that the distribution of routes in the categories of slippery to very slippery is similar throughout the national territory and represents more than three quarters of the roads evaluated. Under these conditions, the probabilities of traffic accidents rise to 20 events per million vehicles due to the risk of skidding or difficulty braking.
The routes with non-slip and low-slip conditions represented 20% of the total road network evaluated.
