Performance Specification for Sealed Unbound Granular Pavement Design and Construction: Twelve-Year Case Study

Increasingly constrained road construction and maintenance budgets provide the ideal opportunity for technical innovations to challenge existing paradigms and provide even greater value for road agencies. As an example, New Zealand’s specifications for pavement materials tend to be recipe based and are designed to produce premium aggregates for unbound granular pavement construction; however, these specifications are not always ‘fit for purpose’. This paper describes a case study of a specification that was developed to produce a ‘fit for purpose’ pavement that reduced costs without compromising performance and conserved huge volumes of aggregate. The performance based specification for design and construction of thin-surfaced flexible unbound granular pavements was developed in collaboration with Transit (now New Zealand Transport Agency) to foster the use of marginal, non-conforming aggregates that give similar performance to premium base course materials. Another objective was to preserve prime quality aggregates. A project completed under this specification in 2002 was described in detail in a paper at the 2004 Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting, and this paper is an update on the earlier paper, including twelve years of actual performance monitoring data which demonstrate the benefits of the innovation that should be adopted on a wider scale. Collaboration was the key to taking advantage of existing research and technical capability in order to provide value for money without unduly compromising levels of service.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AFD60 Flexible Pavement Design. Alternate title: Performance Specification for Sealed Unbound Granular Pavement Design and Construction: A Twelve-Year Case Study.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Pidwerbesky, Bryan
  • Alabaster, David
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 94th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2015-1-11 to 2015-1-15
• Date: 2015

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 13p
• Monograph Title: TRB 94th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Case studies; Flexible pavements; Pavement design; Pavement performance; Performance based specifications
• Identifier Terms: New Zealand Transport Agency
• Uncontrolled Terms: Marginal aggregates; Unbound aggregate base courses
• Geographic Terms: New Zealand
• Subject Areas: Design; Highways; Pavements; I22: Design of Pavements, Railways and Guideways;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01551004
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 15-2065
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Jan 26 2015 1:23PM