Useful Life of Roads and Utilities 2

[LandDev222]

Does anyone have any information (with source) on the useful life of roadway and utility systems (one source I found has road useful life as 20 years for example).

 

[spm]

In the AASHTO design method a pavement is designed w/ a particular performance period in mind. That time enters the design through the traffic analysis over that design period. The selection of the performance period can be affected by function of the road, types of maintenance, initial budget, and life cycle costs. But typically, 20 years is very common performance period. Information can be found in Pavement Analysis and Design by Yang Huang published by Prentice Hall

 

[tgk]

Hi<br><br>We had Build Roads in Emirates and the roads build in 1975 still stands intact except few Potholes here and there caused by services departments digging and repairing.<br><br>Generally a Guaranteed life of 10 Years is generally expected, If the work is executed sincerely and taking care of all the specification requirement and selecting good material, and proper Mix design done with quality of construction then Roads can still be used for 30 years. We always take good care of Mix, and quality of work and even tested for refusal for 700 Blows. In 92 we resurfaced about 85 KMs of road, which was over 20 years old, and it is now performing very well and expected to give good service at least for another 6 to 10 years.<br>

 

'Useful'ness here is meant dor 'acceptable level of service' and that level is reached after some years under the deteriorating effects of traffic loads and the weather. A new road starts serving at the 'highest level'(L=100) and if you can accept L=80, then the period to get down to 80 is your road's 'useful life' which may get shortened by heavy commercial vehicles or get more years with a robust design of reinforced concrete pavement. If you know the mechanism of deterioration and forecast the future traffic (not just in numbers, but loads) then would predict the 'life' of the road. AASHTO and other agencies developped mathematical models to predict 'useful life' or rather select say 20-30 yrs as 'life' and design the road pavement accordingly.