How long should an asphalt road last?

[Married2Allis]

A county road runs by my house. Not much traffic on it -- probably less than 100 cars/trucks per day. Occasional 18-wheeler, farm tractor, delivery truck and daily school bus. Road was put in 1987. The county put 'tar and chip?' on it a few years ago but it is cracking up now everywhere. Seems like they are lining their pockets with tax revenue while roads like this deteriorate. It is ready for serious repairs or to be totally replaced. How long should an asphalt road like that last before falling apart?

 

[dr sportster]

I believe the life of an asphalt road depends on the heavy truck traffic and temps of the roadway.

 

[Dick2]

Most asphalt roads were put down without making a substantial base, which guarantees that the road will fail eventually. If a good base is put down first, asphalt will last a long, long time. I suspect the road that you are concerned about does not have an engineered base.

 

[jeffcat]

Any "good" road needs to be constructed correctly. Saw a program on how the Roman Legions built their roads and how they are still there! Same as railroad track road beds. If not on bed rock then you need a very good bed with drainage. Also two inches of blacktop ain't going to cut it. They just put in a new bridge approach near by and it was like 8 or 10 inches think.

 

[rrlund]

The road out front is a class A county road. Fair amount of traffic. That one was last paved 27 years ago. It's OK,but getting kind of rough in places. There's another one running north paved a few years later. That one's BAD already.

 

[howdy1960]

When my Dad worked for NYSDOT, tar and chip was another way of saying tar and stone.
It's a way to lengthen the life span of the asphalt. The tar seals the cracks from the destructive forces of water while the stone gives the tires grip.
One of the factors involved in lifespan is how much work was performed prior to laying the topcoat. Did they sweep it off and repave or did they dig up the base and replace everything including the culverts?
The road in front of my childhood home was torn up replacing the base and repaved in the early 70s and has been tared and stoned at least 3 times since the 90s. Traffic is upwards of a few hundred vehicles an hour depending on time of day. It is a primary road.
The road where I live now, a secondary road, was swept and repaved 7 years ago and was tared and stoned 2 years ago. It gets a couple hundred vehicles a day.

 

[the tractor vet]

The big thing with a road lasting is how it was built in the first place . The base is so important along with drainage . If ya can not keep the base dry then you will have a huge problem from wet weather and then the freeze and thaw . I can show you roads and streets that i worked on back in the sixty's that are still like new . They all had one thing in common good drainage and a good solid compacted base of multipul layers of compacted base starting with large size slag stepping down to what we called 8 X . The base was a total of two feet and below the base was there tile lines another three feet below that that emptied into storm drain catch bassen . The tile drainage ditches were backfilled with pea gravel . Tile lines ranged from six to eight inch lines , back then it was clay tile . If we got into a swampy area the base material got bigger and a lot more was put down and much thicker . The pavement layer was usually 8 to 10 inches . I spent a good bit of time setting on a old D8 pushing the spreader box putting down base . When i worked in the first oil and gas play around here i built a bunch of locations and when putting in the entrance roads to the well pads i did the same thing i put in a ROAD that would handle heavy truck traffic not like some of the other site builders did as they would put down just four or six inches of #1 slag and call it good and when the first heavy rain came that stone was gone after the second truck pulled in and went out of sight . Here in my town they throw money at the same streets every three years maybe four and the black top that they put down peals off . They grind off two inches then lay down and inch and a half of base compacted to one inch then come back and put down and inch and a half finish coat compacted to and inch over top of old broken pavement under it with out fixen the bad base under it. The Chip and seal is a make you feel good pavement , does nothing to level out the road and in time all the nice new stone that they put down will end up in the ditches . They do nothing to help with drainage along the road so the road bed gets soaked and soft then the big trucks come down the road and hit them soft spots and squeeze the mud out a bit and the hole gets deeper and it gets wetter . So the key is drainage and base .

 

[Al Baker(pumpman)]

This falls into the category of "we don't have time or money to do it right, But we do have enough to do it twice".

 

[JML755]

(quoted from post at 13:38:04 08/01/16) This falls into the category of[b:eb2cf4ee04] "we don't have time or money to do it right, But we do have enough to do it twice"[/b:eb2cf4ee04].

You're right, municipalities don't always have the money to "do it right". That's because they have budgets to live within. Our township is very frugal with our tax dollars. The largest portion of our budget is "road maintenance" and they work closely with the County Road Commission to spend our dollars wisely. They have effectively done "tar and stone" on a number of our paved roads at lower cost than re-paving. For the unpaved roads, they have a regular chloride schedule, a regular grading schedule, ditching program to keep water moving, etc. It's easy to say "do it right, money is no object" but that is not reality. That is unless you want YOUR taxes to go up to pay for it.

 

[Ted in NE-OH]

State routs in OH are repaved about every 10 years.

 

[Frantz]

Not spending money isn't always a sign of lining their pockets. More small governments would do well to put money aside for a rainy day. A 30 year old road may soon need
replaced, but every year it last without major repairs is a year longer the cost can be spread out over. Just as our household cost of living has gone up, so has the cost
of operation. Cost of building a road too has gone up due to increased regulations for such things.

 

[rd 2N in mo]

Seems they spec. a lower grade of bitumen and it doesn't last as long.
better roads = more taxes.
you get what you paid for

 

[01gentdc]

my driveway was paved in 1990 ,..still real good around the u that cicles the house ,,. the front part that connects the circle has been taking some real abuse from my neighbor winery that has egress engress rights dating back to 1930 ,.. but it is in good condition yet,.. after 100 loads of concrete trux,,. just as many gravel trux ,,. and 100 semis per yr and heavy strait trux,, not to mention the 100 cars during the week and the weekend total going betwen 75 vehicles daily to 150 depending on the events ,,..all this goes on half mile past my house ,,.but everydamvehicle Is 20 ft from my 1930 built front porch , a REAL PIA ,that we afre getting tired of . all that will change next yr ,,the winery is buying 60ft of the cornfield I rent and will build to county standards a 18ft wide roadway on their property and will ign t vacate my land and we will plant alfalfa in the old roadway after we take up the road and trade it for topsoil ,,.. at least that is the plan ,. this yr they needed 3 phase service back there so I insisted and they did put the poles all on the property line ,.thus negating the possbility of a shared road beyond my house ,. now most of our county rds will last 10 yrs ,, if we seal the craks we easily gain another 5 yrs ,,. my road when I became commissioner in 2002 was 16ft at best with a pig drain ,waller for a ditch,, that was typical of most all the roads we had in my district ,, what we did for the most part is widen all the roads that we rebuilt to a minimum of 18ft and up to 22 ft for main drainer connector roads,,..and of course we sometimes had hostile landowners I had to assauge to get rite away permission ,, where the terrain or people would not allow us to put a ditch ,,. we made a underground aquifer by digging down 3ft on the sides of the road , some 3 to 5ft wide in order to correct the surveyor true equal property line adjustments ,. this deep trench we filled with shot rock and smaller rock topt off with53s and waste lime,.. it was then compacted and rested a winter to settle in before paving would begin in april , after serveral days of rain it is a neat thing to go by these roads with a long aquifier and go to the bottom of the hill and seethe clean water flowing thru ,,.... for the most part we rarely had to go back and fix trouble spots , mostly they were red clay pumpers,. keeping water off of the road and immedeitely under is most important to the life of pavement ..

 

[dhermesc]

If you think the county commissioners are lining their pockets you should run for a seat and keep them all honest.

 

[Married2Allis]

I'd hate to tell you what I pay in taxes. No idea where the money is going. And if ran for county government the only way I'd get elected is if I were a D-*$@%#!crat.

 

[oldtanker]

General rule of thumb if the road was done right in the first place is 20+years. That means the base was built up like it should have been and the enough base coat and top coat was applied. All too often they cut corners by going with less than the recommended thickness. The township paved the road in front of my BIL's place a few years back to keep some lake shore people happy. The first year it started breaking up. No base coat and the blacktop was only a couple of inches. Now my BIL is the only farmer on that chunk of road. So it was his equipment and the milk truck that broke it up. Had they put in at least 3" of base and 3" of top it would have lasted a long time.

Extreme weather conditions, both heat and cold will affect life too.

Rick

 

[INCase]

around here 2 years tops.

amish horses chew it up so bad it gets a bad groove and holds water, makes the freeze thaw worse.

county paves in the groove to get by but the feather edges of that break up within a couple months and its bad or worse than it was.

We require non-motorized plates here but i'm sure we don't charge enough for horse damage.

 

[Athol Carr]

The life of an asphalt road also depends if cows have been allowed along the road, cow manure rapidly damages asphalt.

 

[RBoots]

That's funny, I'm the only guy in my county that has a population of Amish in the territory I maintain. The other guys think it's funny when I see horse tracks on the gravel roads and call them "4 legged pothole makers". Their hooves make little divets in the middle of the road that water lays in, which cars then drive through making a line of potholes down the middle of the road.

 

[David from Kansas]

I agree life is directly related to the amount of over-weight 18 thru 26 wheelers banging over it.

 

[jimg.allentown]

The road that I grew up on was a gravel road. About every other year, the township would send out a tar and stone crew to first spray liquid asphalt and then cover it with stone chips. The road seemed to hold up OK, but it was never really paved. It was pretty much gravel with tar and chips over it.

 

[Patrick Klise]

I live in Minnesota just west of Minneapolis.Minnesota (and other northern states) have a huge problem with potholes in the
spring. Of course the DOT just says "it's the thawing and re-freezing" So I contacted the states director of transportation to ask
what was the solution. He said they're "working on" some solutions! Well...here's one I pointed out. Helsinki Finland has virtally
the same winter weather as Minneapolis but they have virtually no pothole problem. Why? They design their road bases TWICE as deep
as Minnesota. It of course costs more but in the long run is cheaper. The Minnesota DOT sent and engineering team to Finland last
year to find out what the Finns were doing and hopefully begin to use their input. I've got another solution---put roads out to
bid as design/build with a 15 year enforceable warranty from the builder (complete with performance bond) and I suspect you'd soon
find out that pothole free roads can be built.

 

[RBoots]

Chip seal does work well if prepared
properly beforehand. It is designed to last
4-6 years, and basically is a much cheaper
bandaid until the funds come through to
properly rebuild it. It really helps fill
the cracks, keeping them from wreaking havoc
in the freeze/thaw cycles. Now a road can be
paved nicely with a good thick layer, and
have a good base, but we have done studies
along with many other MI counties, and a
fully loaded 10,000 gallon liquid manure
tanker, hauled singly, let alone doubles as
many like to do, can destroy the base of a
class A road in 35 or less trips during
spring thaws (exempt from frost laws in MI).
Their width usually puts the outside tire
right on the edge of the road, pushing the
base out from under it, pushing the pavement
down, and making a berm along the edge of
the road. Water lays in wheel tracks of
pavement and is held their by berm made from
road base, and water soaks under road,
causing a vicious cycle. Paved roads with a
good base with low amounts of heavy vehicle
traffic can, and do last a long time, even
if only paved a few inches thick. Like 30
years long time. You still will get potholes
that need to be patched here and there, but
that is a given.

 

[01gentdc]

that's what I did in 2002 , and gonna come back and doit again in 2018 ,. currently completing 8 yrs on the county council , because of my cancer scare ,, gonna take a 2 year rest and recuperate , council is a good job that puts you on the cutting edge of approving all expenditures and opertunities for the county ,, It HELPS A LOT ,.,. ,.if you are committed to fairness honesty and grounded with the good words of the bible,.. being a County Commissioner is the Hardest Job YOU Will Ever LOVE,.. but it takes energy,.