Roadworks 101 - choosing the right surface for New Zealand roads скачать в хорошем качестве

Roadworks 101 - choosing the right surface for New Zealand roads

Deciding on which surface to use on New Zealand’s roads is largely determined by what’s bene built underneath the surface - the road pavement. Our roads tend to use flexible pavements, where the surface of the road moves and the material below flexes beneath the weight of trucks and vehicles. They suit our geography, seismic activity and traffic volumes across much of the network. Chipseal is a very flexible material and allows for a lot of movement and flexibility, while asphalt is quite brittle and requires a very strong pavement layer beneath it. To use asphalt on roads that don’t currently have it, we need to strengthen the pavement below by digging it out and rebuilding it much deeper and stronger. The cost of doing that on top of the asphalt can be 20 or 30 times more than the cost of a chip seal layer. We use asphalt where we have stronger pavements that can handle the extra weight of high vehicle numbers, such as cities and large towns, and we use chip seal on more rural and low-demand parts of the network. This approach keeps costs down, so we can deliver more work across more lane kilometres and helps us get the entire network to a better overall condition.