OCR Text |
Show Fundamentals Of Road Building In a recent magazine article, Bernard E. Gray, Highway Engineer En-gineer of the Asphalt Institute, emphasized the following fundamentals funda-mentals of road building: 1. The attitude of the engineei toward different types of surfacing should be to use the lowest cost type adequate for climatic and present traffic conditions. 2. Every proper engineering principle, prin-ciple, such as adequate drainage, careful grading and rigid inspection, inspec-tion, should be applied to low-cost surfaces as weU as expensive ones, so that, as traffic grows, aU finished finish-ed work will serve as a foundation for additional improvements. 3. With some types of surface, maintenance costs increase with time. With others particularly low-cost surfaces the reverse is true. Maintenance work is cumulative cumula-tive and decreases as the years pass. This is an important factor in any sound road program. 4. - Too many communities have built "costly monuments to pride" roads costing infinitely more than is justified by the traffic when a common sense attitude would have given them three times the useful mileage for the same money. 5. The engineer or highway official of-ficial who best serves his community commun-ity is the one who first studies local lo-cal traffic and materials and then adapts a low-cost surfacing plan that really meets local needs. These five statements are worth remembering. Every road is an individual problem and must be treated as such. Even so, certain generalizations hold good, one of them being that first-class weatherproof weath-erproof roads, suitable for a fairly heavy volume of traffic, .can be built for a very few thousand dollars dol-lars a mile by using bases of locally lo-cally produced materials with a bituminous surface. A multitude of counties, states and municipalities have given their citizens long wearing, serviceable roads and streets without inflating the tax bill. |