One of the most important parameters involved in the design of road pavements is the expected traffic load. This factor has a directbearing on the thickness requirements of the pavement. For practical purposes, only the loading from heavy-goods vehicles should be considered as, in coparison, the loading from private cars has a negligible effect. When deciding on the layer thicknesses of a road pavement, it is essential to know whether the traffic will be concentrated in one wheel path, or distributed across the width of the traffic lane. When commercial vehicles travelling along a roadway use wheel paths that are transversely distributed across the traffic lane (lateral shifts of the wheel path), the pavement is less severely loadedat representative points in the cross section than when the vehicles all follow the same wheel path (uniform wheel path). The road and hydraulic engineering division of the dutch department of public works has carried out further research into the phenomenon of transversely distributed heavy-goods vehicles and the ffect of lateral shiftsof the wheel path on the design of flexible pavements. The study was particularly concerned with investigating how this phenomenon relates to roads with a full-depth asphalt pavement with specific material properties. This paper appears in transportation research record no. 1227, Rigid and flexible pavement design and analysis: unbound granular materials, tire pressures, backcalculation, and design methods.
Abstract