2023 - India - Performance of Thin Pavement Renewals

Under the present guidelines, the road roughness has been considered as prime indicator for selecting the road stretches for maintenance works and first priority is given to worst road sections. It is found that the existing maintenance policies no longer provide the required results, cause discomfort to the road users, and result in various accidents and frequent traffic jams. Various newly road surfaced stretches from recently declared National Highways of Madhya Pradesh: NH 59, NH59-A, State Highway-18 were selected for the analysis purpose and data was collected as per the requirement by carrying out field studies which includes, evaluation of pavement conditions through field work, crust details, road inventory survey, structural evaluation, functional evaluation, traffic volume survey data, evaluation of pavement material through laboratory work, photographic survey for various distress conditions. The study indicates that roads recently surfaced with thin renewals were prematurely failed and could not serve the designed life. Study also suggest that new renewals provided prior major rehabilitation without framing different distress conditions and avoiding mandatory investigations required to find out root causes of failures would result in complete waste of money and leads to disaster. The result also shows that routine maintenance approach with thin renewals prematurely failed with in two years and starts from rating good with initial roughness 1.8 meters/km and ends in completely road failure and required emergency reconstruction.