ABSTRACT
Finnish Transport Infrastructure Agency owns approximately 15000 bridges in public road network. Need for higher loads in road traffic is ongoing and design codes becomes stricter at the same time. In case of old bridges, design load are much lower than the needs of current traffic.Finland’s Ministry of Transport and Communications made significant amendments to the Decree on the Use of Vehicles on the Road on 2013. As regards bridges, the most important changes were the increase of permissible mass of vehicles from 38 t to 42 t, and combinations from 60t to 76 t. Since that, there has been ongoing studies for High Capacity Transport (HCT) vehicles. HCT-vehicles have bigger total masses and larger dimensions. Axel loads remain the same. Economical savings as well as decrease of CO2-emissions of this trial is causing pressure to allow more HCT-vehicles on new routes or even raise permissible masses on whole road network.When examining the effects on increasing loads, it becomes crucial to know your bridges. FTA has a management system of engineering structures, where all the bridge data is stored. Management system stores for example old blueprints, damage data, maintenance history and bearing capacity for special transports. With this tool, it is possible to find the weakest bridges in different routes as well as make easily statistics about the whole network.In Finland, there are about 450 different measuring points where we get automatically some basic data about our traffic flow. To get more specific data, we have yearly done weighing in motion (WIM). Traffic information has been used to make simulations of the traffic flow. Simulated traffic flow has been used to making calculation about the change of static and fatiguing effects on bridges. It is possible to see the biggest effects that the increase of masses cause to bridge infrastructure, by combining these results with a general information from Management system.
