Performance modelling of low volume village roads in india

Abstract

India has nearly 3.3 million km length of road network which is the second largest network in the world. Indian road network has five categories, namely, Express ways, National Highways, State Highways, Other District Roads, and Village Roads. The traffic volume of village roads in India is extremely low. Presently, the total length of low volume village roads in India is around 27, 50,000 km. Mainly, village roads connect small villages with each other and also with other category of roads. They play a vital role in the economic growth of the country, as they have direct linkage with agricultural and production sectors. The Government of India invests huge money every year on low volume road construction. Most of these roads are constructed with flexible pavements. Compared with construction, maintenance of these roads has proved to be a difficult task due to non-availability of scientific performance prediction models for the low volume village roads. Therefore, an attempt has been made in this study to develop distress prediction models for the distresses, namely, cracking, potholes, and roughness which are the most commonly occurring distress on flexible pavements of low volume village roads. For the development of model database the consist of a total 173 test sections of 200 meter, each were identified on low volume village roads in Thiruvallur district, Tamil Nadu State in India. The data related to subgrade strength in terms of California Bearing Ratio (CBR), thickness of pavement layers, traffic in terms of Commercial Vehicles Per Day (CVPD), cracking as a percentage of total pavement area, potholes as a percentage of total pavement area and roughness value were physically measured for all the test sections. newline