7 ms·
I've always read that road damage was caused by heavy vehicles(semis) which stress fracture the roads, which in turn fill with water, freeze, expand, rinse and
by axaxs 9y ago
I've always read that road damage was caused by heavy vehicles(semis) which stress fracture the roads, which in turn fill with water, freeze, expand, rinse and repeat. This article seems to imply it's caused by the road design itself, though. Wonder which is true (or both)?
- throwawaylalala 9y agoWe have potholes in Florida. No freezing.
- cmontella 9y agoBut we don't really have potholes in CA, at least not the quantity and quality that I experienced living in PA. It's a minefield there right now, so I would imagine freezing is part of the problem, or at least exacerbates it.
- mgberlin 9y agoI live in Santa Cruz CA and and deal with terribly potholed roads. The air temperature here rarely gets below freezing, and I've never seen any ice on the roads to indicate that the ground temperature has been below freezing. Clearly something besides the freeze/thaw cycle is causing potholes.
- tigershark 9y agoWhat? I never seen worse road in my life than in LA..
- wlll 9y agoIs that because in LA you have time to scrutinise in depth a great deal of tarmac? ;)
- haldean 9y agoYou must have never taken a bike down Market Street :)
- denimnerd 9y agorain will do the same thing though.
- woliveirajr 9y agoPut water inside the hole, run over it with a car that will put some pressure on it, and it'll fill all those small cracks inside the asphalt. Repeat many times. Also, asphalt isn't solid, it get thinner when the sun is high, deforming every time a car runs over it in the summer. South of south America, more or less equivalent to Florida: no freezing during winter and not that hot during summer, but everytime there's many rainy days, holes will appear. Get few days of hot sun and the roads will deform a bit, specially where trucks and buses run over.
- tarmon 9y agoJust want to point out that it's asphalt, not asfalt. :)
- MisterTea 9y agoNo, it's ashfault. Though, I don't know what he did exactly.
- yousir 9y ago> South of south America, more or less equivalent to Florida Are you calling North America "America", and then go on and call Florida "south America", as if there isn't such a place in the world as South America? I do not approve of this North America-centric view of the world at all.
- mc32 9y agoSouthern would work better than south. Proper place names which have cardinal pints in their names typically will use South and not Southern. So we have South Africa, South Australia, South Dakota. But southern California, southern South Dakota, etc.
- mitchty 9y agoAmerica refers to The United States of America. Same as we don't refer to Mexico all the time as Estados Unidos Mexicanos. I don't approve of getting upset over turns of phrase online. Principle of charity.
- jack9 9y agoMere existence can't be eradicated. There are multiple issues. The existence of them (forgone), the frequency of their appearance and growth lifecycle. Changing any of those things, affects the maintenance problems.
- cbhl 9y ago[edit: removed]
- imglorp 9y agoPA is notoriously bad at coordinating tearing up with other work. It seems that 1ms after a clean paved road is down, someone in another dept is plotting to tear it up to get at their utility, then hire 2 guys with a shovel to do a very halfassed patch job afterwards, which either is heaved up high or sunk down low. The halfassed patch will become a pothole for the next 10 years of repatching it badly over and over again.
- megaman22 9y agoUsually it's badly designed road bed underneath. Many roads don't have a proper foundation underneath, so unless that is fixed, just repaving them is a stopgap measure, and it just starts cracking and subsiding in the same places it was bad before.
- CoffeeDregs 9y agoFrom the article: Conventional wisdom suggests that cracks begin deep in the roadbed and gradually migrate upward, eventually breaking out on the asphalt surface. Not so, claims Halim. The cracks have already been created by the rollers, regardless of the temperature and asphalt mixture used. I would guess that the mechanism of action is that water gets through the cracks and erodes the underlayment.
- marcosdumay 9y agoWell built roads can stand heavier vehicles. If you either run too heavy vehicles, or build your roads badly, potholes will appear.
- Maybestring 9y agoRoads are designed, manufactured, used, and maintained. You can impact road surface wear by tweaking any of these variables. They all affected the surface, there is no single cause.
- lucas_membrane 9y agoIn rainy and hilly places, doesn't water flow under the roads from the sides, making little caverns beneath the pavement that collapse? In hot climates, doesn't heating and cooling from the sun create the cracks. In cold climates, doesn't expansion of ice as it freezes create the cracks? Back 35 or 40 years ago, Phillips petroleum was promoting a paving material that supposedly solved this problem. Where is it? There may be single causes, we just need them all to marry single solutions.
- jaclaz 9y ago>I've always read that road damage was caused by heavy vehicles(semis) which stress fracture the roads, which in turn fill with water, freeze, expand, rinse and repeat. This article seems to imply it's caused by the road design itself, though. Wonder which is true (or both)? In my experience, both. Set aside for one moment this new roller, the reality is that road paving is not exact science, and - even if it was - it is largely executed badly. Paving (and before paving the underneath layers) are more like "cooking" than everything else. It is not like you have the right recipe, good ingredients and follow "instructions" accurately you can replicate some dishes. Usually (of course it greatly depends in local uses and materials available) the first mistake is under-calculating the thickness and consistence of the bottom layers (gravel, sand, quarried rubble, sometimes mixed with cement or lime). The second one (again usually, not always) is inadequate protection from running water (be it coming from rain or from the soil). Then it comes the exact composition of the asphalt, the (right or wrong) type and quantity of bitumen, the temperature at which it is mixed, transported and layered, the amount of compacting, etc., etc. In the last 20 years or so some great betterings have come from the use of reinforcing layers, both in the underpavement (woven or non-woven geotextiles) and in the asphalt itself (geogrids, usually plastic). Whilst geogrids in asphalt are rather costly (both as material and additional work to lay them), high strength geotextiles are relatively cheap and it is surprising how - still today - they are not widely and universally used. Both however are only good for highways and roads outside the city, as the benefit of these textiles is to spread as much as possible any dynamic action provoked by heavy traffic and loads onto the widest possible surface, but in urban contexts the surface (and up to 1-1.5 m depth) is "ruined" by every kind of duct, pipe, cable and other services, often re-cut (over and over) for maintenance/repair/replacement.