A bright orange truck made a few passes along Munger Shaw Road on Friday. It’s called SCRIM, and it’s a road survey machine that tests friction of pavement and surfaces. SCRIM stands for Sideway force Coefficient Routine Investigation Machine.

From the company WDM USA, the technology was developed in the 1960s in the United Kingdom. But it hasn’t been in the states until more recently. And Friday was the first time it’s been in the Northland.

“This data helps agencies make decisions about when, where, and how to make the roads safer,” explained Ryland Potter, the VP of WDM USA.

Taconite tailings as a road aggregate have been on this stretch of Munger Shaw since 2021. It’s been holding up well, according to researchers from UMD’s Natural Resources Research Institute.

“The SCRIM is a really neat addition,” said Larry Zanko, who retired from NRRI and is still a consultant. “It gives us some continuous friction testing, which we do not have with our current project.”

St. Louis County provided the test deck, and they too are hopeful that they can find another option to help keep the roads safe.

“Good friction has been proven to reduce vehicle running off the road crashes,” said Vic Lund, Traffic Engineer for St. Louis County.

After all, the county uses high friction surface treatment on many county roads, to keep them safer. But it’s very expensive, around $100,000 per curve.

“Taconite tailings are a much less resource intensive way of putting down this kind of high friction surface treatment. If we could use them more often, we could save a lot of CO2 and money and transportation,” added Sara Post, research engineer at NRRI.

There will be more testing done this fall and after the snow plowing this coming winter.