Importance of planning highway maintenance:
- A safe and functional road network is critical to the well-being of every community. The roads not only transport people, vehicles, and commerce, but also all of the other service apparatus required to sustain our current way of living, such as water, sewage, electricity, and telephones.
- It is also critical that there is a planned strategy to highway management and maintenance that assures network safety while minimizing the need for reactive repair and ensures road user serviceability by maximizing the long-term advantages of routine maintenance.
- Highway management and maintenance must also meet the challenge of sustainability, which requires us to achieve a balance of the social, economic, and environmental implications of both individual schemes and the service as a whole, providing for both our current needs and those of future generations to the best of our ability.
Planning your Highway Maintenance:
- Highway maintenance history and road performance:
Examine a highway’s performance and maintenance history to help forecast when it may require repairs.
The extensive information captured when doing road maintenance work gives critical information about how frequently the road requires grading at any given time of year the estimated time to complete the job the expected type of the task
This information, together with a physical condition evaluation if necessary, aids in the development of the highway maintenance programme.
The timetable is continuously updated depending on the performance of highway roads. This performance varies over time owing to variations in weather, traffic levels, and the loss of road material due to rain, dust, and cars driving on it.
- Weather conditions:
Weather conditions may have a considerable influence on the performance of highway maintenance plans.
When the weather is dry and hot
Unsealed roads will corrugate and produce dust. This is due to a decrease in moisture inside the road pavement surface, which causes the road surface to become loose. This loose surface corrugates due to traffic movements. These corrugations become deeper as cars brake and accelerate.
When it’s raining
Potholes, slippery surfaces, and rutting are all frequent defects produced by rainy weather. These flaws are typically created by water being unable to flow freely off the road surface. The steep and low-lying flat sections are particularly vulnerable.
- Traffic Load
Roads having the highest traffic are frequently prioritized for repairs since they wear out faster. Roads with high traffic volumes acquire more problems than roads with low traffic volumes.
Heavy vehicles, such as trucks and buses, can exacerbate faults. Understanding traffic numbers is critical in establishing the highway maintenance programme.
- Deciding the most affordable and efficient way of highway maintenance:
Take great effort in organizing highway maintenance programmes to ensure that highways are planned in the most effective way possible, so that more roads may be worked on in less time.
It is essential to ensure that fewer visits are needed and roads are timely serviced and maintained as a routine, so as to avoid unplanned highway maintenance before the due date and time.