Mass failure is one of the most common failures of low-volume roads in mountainous terrain. Current methods for evaluating stability of these roads require a geotechnical specialist. A stability analysis program, XSTABL, was used to estimate the stability of 3,696 combinations of road geometry, soil, and groundwater conditions. A sensitivity analysis was carried out to find the most important site-specific variables in estimating slope stability, and two regression equations were developed to predict the factor of safety (FS) for a given road, one with the ground-water below the road fill and one with the groundwater in the road fill. The resulting equations predicted failures on road segments where failures were observed to have occurred. A comparison of the predicted FSs from the regression equations with the FS values predicted by the infinite slope equation showed that both methods predicted similar FSs.
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