Equipment World Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/136260
final word | by Kirk Landers Heavy construction's big trend S ince work began on the Interstate Highway System back in the 1950s, so many heavy construction contractors had vocational ties to road construction and maintenance that national magazines and marketers tended to lump the two vocations together: highway/heavy construction. That relationship still exists, but the money in highway construction is steadily migrating away from work involving earthmoving equipment and into preventive maintenance measures that employ specialized equipment for everything from crack sealing to milling to in-place recycling. The trend to an ever-heavier investment in prevention is being driven by declining road budgets which make investment in road reconstruction and replacement ever less attractive. Whereas many highway agencies prioritized reconstructing failing roads in the Seventies and Eighties – the strategy was called "worst first" – the past decade has seen a massive swing to preserving healthy pavements first and whittling away at sub-standard roads second. From the tax-payer's point of view, the swing to prevention is a wise and cost-efficient trend that was perhaps long overdue. From the highway/heavy contractor's point of view, however, it is a market changing trend that will most likely continue for years to come. It's also a trend that the management of many heavy construction firms needs to take into account in strategic planning. Even specialty road contractors involved in paving and milling should be keeping an ear to the ground, and be paying special attention to the second Strategic Highway Research Project (SHRP2) as it wends its way into the modern road management culture. The original SHRP initiative had a paradigm-changing effect on U.S. roads by, among other things, revolutionizing how we design and construct asphalt pavements. SHRP2 has taken aim on a variety of practical challenges, from methods and best practices for rapid, economical bridge replacement to advanced project management practices to measuring the cost-performance of various prevention techniques and technologies for higher-traffic-volume asphalt and concrete pavements (SHRP defines high-volume urban pavements as 10,000 vehicles or more daily, and high volume rural pavements as 5,000 vehicles or more daily). The latter study could have a direct impact on how prevention dollars are spent in the future. While it includes practices that are already proven and widely used such as joint resealing and crack-sealing and filling, it also seeks to develop costperformance data on lesser-used interventions such as chip seals, microsurfacing, ultra-thin overlays and ultra-thin whitetopping. If high-speed, low cost interventions like chip seals and microsurfacing are shown to be cost-effective for higher volume roads, they could siphon money away from more expensive traditional interventions such as milling and overlays in the future. If you do nothing else, follow the progress of SHRP2 at http://shrp2.transportation.org/. If you haven't already done it, highway/heavy contractor groups would be wise to invite various road managers to speak to them about current and long term trends in their field – and especially, how road agencies' needs for contracted services are likely to evolve in the months and years to come. EW 82 June 2013 | EquipmentWorld.com EW0613_Final Word.indd 82 5/29/13 3:23 PM