This paper describes an approach for assessing the economic impacts of increasing axle mass limits and migration to high productivity vehicles at national network level. The assessment was applied to sealed road pavements only. It involved developing the following: 1. representative composite pilot network covering common road and pavement types with typical characteristics and conditions; 2. representative current fleet distribution for each road type; 3. axle load distributions for future fleet vehicles; 4. road user cost models by road type; 5. a loading system that facilitates the determination of annual number of vehicles on each section of the network and associated pavement wear under the different fleet scenarios. The economic impacts were assessed using a whole of life cycle costing approach. The assessment showed that increasing axle mass limits results in an increase in agency costs and high savings in user costs, with truck operators being the main beneficiaries. The later is mainly due to the huge reduction in number of vehicles required to perform the freight task in addition to the reduction in average life cycle network roughness. Migration to high productivity vehicles, on the other hand, results in savings for both the road users and agencies. (a) For the covering entry of this conference, please see ITRD abstract no. E217099.
Samenvatting