ABSTRACT
Road pavements are structures with finite lives. They are designed to withstand a specific number of Equivalent Single Axle Loads (ESALs). Consequently, the truck traffic consumption of ESAL design life, and increased road infrastructure costs associated with it, can increase rapidly where significant volumes of truck traffic is involved.
During the construction of major infrastructure or other objects it is usually necessary to shift large amounts of material from one location to another. The individual works causes higher traffic on the main and regional roads with construction site vehicles, usually within a specified, short period of time, causing more damage and more rapid deterioration of these roads, which are not dimensioned to facilitate that kind of traffic load. Maintenance and restoration of these roads are therefore very high and usually not provided for in planning documents.
The solution to the problem concerns the sharing of costs for reinforcement or repairs of roads between all parties; owner of the road, investor of the construction and/or operators of these works. For this purpose a methodology was developed to determine the necessary corrective measures in the main and regional roads, where increased volume of truck traffic due to construction of certain infrastructures is calculated against the normal volume of the trucks on a measured road section. Then, construction cost per lane per kilometer and design life of the road is used together with the real traffic data measured before and during the construction works with Bridge Weigh-in-Motion system.
