High capacity vehicles road wear impact in South Africa

Abstract

The substantial road maintenance backlog in South Africa, coupled with an inadequate budget allocation, requires high impact solutions in order to preserve the 158 000 km paved road network. Focussing efforts on the heavy vehicles operating on these routes, by ensuring they are more road friendly and payload-efficient, could potentially preserve and extend the pavement structure life. The Smart Truck demonstration project in South Africa permits high capacity vehicles to operate on approved routes outside the prescriptive South African combination mass and length limits, promoting innovation in productivity, safety and road-friendliness. Each vehicle combination participating in the project is subjected to an infrastructure assessment as a measurement of road-friendliness. The Smart Truck project has already shown an estimated $3.6 million savings in road wear over the past six years. This paper reviews the latest data on the road consumption characteristics of high capacity vehicles participating in the demonstration project and estimates the annual monetary savings of road consumption of these vehicles relative to conventional heavy vehicles.