Heavier vehicles and pothole plague need a better road solution

Despite the Governments promises of additional £ billions to fix Britain’s deteriorating roads, the number of potholes continue to rise. Rather than continuing to throw good money after bad, a new approach providing a more robust long-lasting road surface that does not prematurely rut or pothole is required.

The menace and potential danger of potholes continues to increase with the RAC reporting that it attended to nearly 6,000 callouts due to pothole damage between July and September – the highest number for any third quarter since the motoring organisation started its pothole index in 2006. The situation is so bad that at this year’s Conservative Party conference, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced a further £8 billion to fix potholes.

It is simply throwing good money after bad for, in addition to years of poor maintenance, roads are having to contend with heavier vehicle loads not only of lorries weighing potentially up to 48 tonnes but also electric vehicle SUVs that combined with their heavy batteries often weigh over 3 tonnes – by contrast in the 1970s the average family car weighed just over 1 tonne.

Joe Quirke, Chairman of Britpave, the infrastructure industry association said: “The increased deterioration of road surfaces and the need for unscheduled maintenance brings into question the robustness and long-term performance of Britain’s default road surface choice: thin asphalt. What is needed is a construction solution that can successfully meet the demands being placed upon it.”

Quirke highlights a number of long-term, minimum maintenance concrete road options including continuously reinforced concrete pavement with exposed aggregate and Next Generation Concrete Surface that offers the long-term performance of concrete with significant traffic noise reduction. In addition, low carbon concretes, 100% recyclability and evidence that concrete rolling resistance can reduce fuel consumption offers the potential for CO2 reduction benefits of concrete roads.

He said: “Concrete roads, when properly maintained, can last for decades. They have been proven to provide better performance in carrying heavy traffic than asphalt ones and have a track record of carrying more traffic than they were originally designed for.”

Concrete roads are designed to have a performance life of at least 40 years. An asphalt road surface will require re-surfacing after 12 years. The increased in vehicle weights could see asphalt road surfaces requiring attention far sooner. A concrete surface would not require anything other than joint sealing and occasionally localised reconstruction. Indeed, in the US worn out asphalt pavements are frequently repaired with a concrete overlay, where the old pavement is milled out and a 100-150mm concrete layer is added. The concrete is then sawn into 1m squares to resist cracking. It’s a very effective solution on heavily trafficked areas.

Quirke concluded: “Rather that keep wasting money with patch-and-mend fixes that clearly offer no long-term solution, how much better to use a construction solution where the road is built right first time and can meet current and future loading demands.