Industry
Winter MaintenanceThe Challenge
Trafikverket manages winter road maintenance across Sweden through regional contractors responsible for salting, anti-icing, and snow plowing. However, monitoring the effectiveness of these actions across nearly 100,000 kilometres of roads was difficult due to limited measurements and the lack of continuous, objective data.
The Results
With Winter Road Insights, Trafikverket gained continuous vehicle-based road condition data, enabling more transparent oversight of winter maintenance. The system supports better evaluation of contractor performance, faster identification of problem areas, and more data-driven decisions to keep Sweden’s roads safer and better maintained throughout the winter season.
Products Used
Winter Road Insights by NIRAWebsite
www.trafikverket.se"We are the first in the world to use this method. This high-resolution, anonymised data will allow Trafikverket to act quicker on gritting and snow clearance, and systematically evaluate the performance of its maintenance contractors."
About Trafikverket
Sweden's National Transport Authority
The Swedish Transport Administration, Trafikverket, is the national authority responsible for the long-term planning, construction, operation, and maintenance of Sweden's entire transport infrastructure. This includes the country's extensive 98,500-kilometre national road network — spanning everything from major motorways to rural arterial roads.
Ensuring safe, accessible, and reliable travel conditions during Sweden's harsh winter months is one of Trafikverket's most critical operational responsibilities, requiring close coordination with a network of regional maintenance contractors.
The Challenge
Monitoring a nation's winter roads
Trafikverket manages winter road maintenance through a network of regional contractors, each responsible for executing actions such as salting, anti-icing, and snow plowing across their assigned areas. The fundamental challenge was the absence of a unified, objective, and scalable method to continuously monitor the effectiveness of these actions across all regions simultaneously.
Traditional approaches — including manual inspections and a limited number of dedicated measurement vehicles — produced only around 3,000 measurements per winter season. This was insufficient to build a complete, real-time picture of road surface conditions across a network of nearly 100,000 kilometres. Without reliable, continuous data, it was difficult to systematically verify that contractors were meeting service level agreements or to identify which regions or interventions required closer attention.
The Solution
Winter Road Insights: A national quality assurance framework
Trafikverket implemented Winter Road Insights by NIRA Dynamics as a core component of its national winter maintenance quality assurance strategy. By leveraging real-time friction data collected from millions of connected vehicles across Sweden, Trafikverket gained an unprecedented, network-wide view of road surface conditions — at a scale and resolution that was previously impossible.
The platform delivers structured insights on a 24-hour reporting cycle, giving both Trafikverket and its contractors access to the same objective, high-fidelity data. This shared operational picture enables transparent performance evaluation and supports informed decision-making at every level of the organisation.
- Monitor the real-time effectiveness of salting and anti-icing actions across all regions
- Evaluate and compare contractor performance objectively across different geographic areas
- Identify slipperiness-prone road segments and prioritise targeted interventions
- Validate service level compliance using continuous, large-scale road condition data
Adoption
From evaluation to national standard
Trafikverket's adoption of Winter Road Insights reflects a broader strategic shift toward data-driven infrastructure management. After a period of evaluation and pilot deployment, the solution was rolled out as a standard tool for winter maintenance quality assurance across the national road network. All contractors involved in winter maintenance now have access to the same high-fidelity data, ensuring consistency, transparency, and accountability across every region of Sweden.
This approach positions Trafikverket as a global pioneer in connected-vehicle-based road management — the first national road authority in the world to adopt this method at scale.
The Results
Safer roads, smarter operations
With Winter Road Insights, Trafikverket has fundamentally transformed its approach to winter maintenance oversight. The system provides the objective, continuous evidence needed to:
- Evaluate and compare the performance of contractors across all regions with confidence
- Validate that winter maintenance actions are achieving the intended safety outcomes
- Identify underperforming areas and trigger targeted corrective actions faster
- Optimise resource allocation and reduce unnecessary salt usage through precise, data-driven targeting
- Build a historical record of winter road conditions to support long-term strategy and procurement decisions
By embedding vehicle-based road condition data into daily workflows, Trafikverket is better equipped to fulfil its core mission — ensuring that Sweden's roads are safe, accessible, and well-maintained for every road user, throughout every winter season.
