Environmentally optimised design of low volume sealed roads in sub tropical and tropical climates.

There are many factors that determine the behaviour or performance of a road pavement. However, when traffic is heavy, it is traffic that has the most important effect. As a result, we find that most pavement design methods concentrate on the traffic aspect, recommending increasing thicknesses of pavement structure for higher levels of traffic. The design methods then deal with most of the other factors simply by specifying limiting values of the relevant pavement variables; in other words there is no full design process involved at all. (Author/publisher)