Effect of Overloaded Traffic on Road Pavements Service Life, Structure and Maintenance Costs

Abstract

Traffic overloads are a real challenge for transportation infrastructures and offices. It contributes to road pavement damage and to vehicle accidents. This has a significant impact on pavement design and maintenance. The objective of this paper is to dress a statistical description of vehicle overloads on some sections of Burkina Faso’s Road network and to measure and sensitise people on the effect of overloads on pavement structures, their durability and their maintenance costs and/or take them into account for pavement design. So heavy goods traffic data were collected on six weight stations. The analysis of their data show that around 74.79% of heavy goods traffic are overloaded with maximum average axle loads of 16.92 tons and a record axle load of 24.94 tons. The analysis of the impact of these freight truck overloads on pavements shows that they significantly reduce the pavement service life and increase their maintenance costs following power function model respectively. Dealing with these overloads requires an important increase of pavement structure and consequently the investment costs.