ABSTRACT

Everything that sustains us-grown, mined, or drilled-begins [its journey to us] on a low-volume road (LVR). Could there be a more profound statement about as prosaic a thing as a road?

About 34 million kilometres of roads spread across the face of the earth, equivalent to a highway circling the equator more than 800 times. Only about 57% of the world’s roads are sealed with bitumen, concrete, or stone [1.1]. The length of unsealed roads is extremely variable from region to region (Figure 1.1). Virtually all the world’s unsealed roads, and about 85% of the sealed roads, carry a traffic volume of 1000 veh/day or less.