Showing posts with label Pavements. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pavements. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 5, 2017

Waves Eat Away Part of Kamehameha Hwy.

Allyson Blair reports on the worsening erosion along Kamehameha Hwy.


Traffic engineering expert Panos Prevedouros agrees.

"It's a major risk. The pavement is undermined so it can collapse in a small or large degree, to which I don't know, at any time," said Prevedouros.

Prevedouros says the road needs immediate repair. In the meantime drivers shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the undermined asphalt.

"Everything in that area seems to be completely eroded. Therefore even the crash guard that looks to be okay, although it has some rust on the backside, it may be structurally compromised," said Prevedouros.

Tuesday, July 25, 2017

Honolulu’s Potholes Are Costing Drivers And Taxpayers Millions

Quoted in Courtney Teague's story in the Honolulu Civil Beat about the poor quality of pavements in Honolulu.

...

Local asphalt industry expert Jon Young and Panos Prevedouros, professor and chair of the University of Hawaii Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, agree that the city’s methods for filling potholes are cost-effective, but not the longest-lasting.

“Dramatic deterioration” of Oahu’s roads at the turn of the century forced the city and state to be more proactive about maintenance, said Prevedouros, who once ran for mayor on a platform that focused on fixing infrastructure. He said the city — and especially the state — could improve maintenance strategies.

The state paid UH $1 million over about five years for a report by Ricardo Archilla, associate professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, that looked at ways Oahu could improve its roads and created the recommendations, Prevedouros said.

Though the city did not pay for the report, Prevedouros said it has been quicker to adopt its findings and conduct field assessments.

....

Prevedouros described the city’s pothole repair methods as “amateurish,” but cost-effective.

He pointed to “very durable” European techniques as a superior example, which involve squaring off the edges of a pothole and using heavy trucks to pack the pothole down in 30-40 minutes. There’s no difference in the amount of time taken to fill the pothole, but there is a difference in quality and longevity of the repair — and cost, he said.

Pothole repairs on state roads take place at night, he said, and more time is spent on them because of the higher traffic volumes.

The city usually fixes potholes quickly during the day in 30 minutes to an hour, Prevedouros said. When crews have to leave for the next pothole, he said the new asphalt isn’t completely dry and is already being damaged by traffic.

...

Overall, Prevedouros of the University of Hawaii gave Oahu’s roads a D+ grade. The average lifespan of Hawaii roads is short and the powerful sun poses a constant threat, he said.

Road repaving should be prioritized over pothole repair, he said.

“We have made a business of (repairing potholes),” he said. “…It’s emergency Band-Aids and that’s not a way to run any system … it shows that (the road) is way past deterioration.”


Thursday, February 9, 2017

Vehicle Taxation by Mileage -- California Simulation

At a recent ASCE* web discussion board the subject was VMT taxation which is scheme where the usage of roads (mileage or Vehicle Miles of Travel or VMT) is used as a base to collect highway taxes in addition to or instead of the fuel taxes.

I'll discuss the pros and cons at another time. There are many and quite complicated pros and cons because of the means and technologies involved, the rates involved and of course the "big brother" syndrome, all which open a Pandora's box of social, political and taxation implications.

Meanwhile a user on the board posted a number of interesting pictures of his simulated VMT highway tax collection along with a sample bill, as shown below.






Clearly, the system knows the driver's exact route, his speed compliance and provides ratings for his braking and cornering performance. Too much info in the hands of the government, right?

In California they still exempt electric vehicles from taxes, but part of the the VMT tax justification is to address the disparity of EVs using highways but paying no fuel tax. This is another controversy.

An overarching question is this: Is a complex system for VMT tax collection and the necessary big government behind its oversight and administration worth it? How much of the extra taxes will actually wind up spent of highway maintenance and improvement?


(*) American Society of Civil Engineers 

Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Honolulu Star Advertiser: Road Woes Roll On


I was quoted extensively in the headline article Road Woes Roll On of the September 28, 2016 edition of the Honolulu Star Advertiser, the main newspaper in the state of Hawaii.

The latest Reason report found that Hawaii, with the nation’s smallest state-run road network at 1,016 miles, in 2013 spent about 2-1/2 times the national average in total costs per mile: $405,269.

Despite that heavy spending, the report further found Hawaii’s roads to be the worst in the U.S. for urban pavement conditions.

Unfortunately, it’s the worst of both worlds. We overpay and we under-receive,” said Panos Prevedouros, who heads the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department.

The statistics are reliable because these are self-reported numbers. They don’t paint a good picture for us,” added Prevedouros, who specializes in transportation.

...

Having the nation’s smallest road network also helps drive up the state’s average cost per mile, he said.

Prevedouros agreed.

“It’s like a small apartment and a big apartment — they still have the same appliances,” he said Monday, making a comparison to state road networks and the agencies that must maintain them.

It’s impossible for us to be at the top” of Reason’s list, Prevedouros said. But “there is a lot of room for improvement.

Hawaii might face some unique challenges, but it also avoids problems faced by mainland states, such as heavy interstate travel, Prevedouros said.

...

“The administration now is making significant improvements to make the maintenance better,” Sakahara said, adding that policy could lead to better grades in subsequent annual Reason reports for the Ige years.

Prevedouros said he believed the policy “may make the numbers even worse.”

Without adding more highway capacity, the state’s congestion grades for the Reason reports will likely worsen, he said.

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Old Tires into New Roads: Save Cost and Cut Noise

Engineers are designing quieter streets by adding rubber “crumbs”, reclaimed from shredded tires, to the bitumen and crushed stone used to make asphalt.

Enough tires are recycled in America each year to produce 20,000 lane-miles of road pavement mix, enough to re-pave about 0.5% of America's roads, according to Liberty Tire Recycling, a Pittsburgh firm that handles around a third of America's recycled tires.(1)

It is now possible to make rubberized asphalt less expensively than the traditional sort because rubber can partially replace bitumen, the binding agent used to hold the crushed stones together in ordinary asphalt. Bitumen is derived from oil, which means its price has risen over the past decade alongside that of crude oil. (1)

Discarded tires are cheap and are likely to get cheaper. In rich countries, around one tire is thrown away per person per year. (1)

In Hawaii we burn tires at the AES coal plant. This is much better than dumping them in a landfill or wasting fuel to send them out of state. But we should be making new roads with them.

(1) The Economist, When the rubber hits the road, June 2012.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Better Pavements for Safety and Low Noise

On a recent trip in a driving rainstorm on Interstate 80 and I-680 (California), there were a variety of pavement types. Some seemed to collect a thin layer of water that was tossed into the air by cars and trucks, creating a blinding fog, which made for near-zero visibility. However, on some blacktop sections with equally heavy rain, there was no layer of water and no wall of spray coming off other vehicles. The visibility there was excellent. Why the difference?

The latter is open-graded asphalt, which Caltrans (the California Department of Transportation) now uses on most paving projects, and it is wonderful. It allows water to drain off the surface and into a top permeable layer — almost eliminating the spray kicked up on older pavement.

This asphalt uses pieces of gravel 3/8 of an inch thick. Underneath are 2 inches of rubberized asphalt, flexible material that withstands the wear and tear of heavy big rigs twice as long as conventional asphalt.

The uniform pieces of gravel on top do not bind as tightly as varied sizes used in other paving, so water seeps through the first few inches of pavement and drains off.

When open-graded asphalt was used on a curvy stretch of Highway 17 a few years ago, crashes dropped 41% in the first three months. On I-880, where a 26-mile repaving job ended in 2002, crashes fell 15%, from 3,172 in 2000 to 2,696 in 2004.

When you saw water being kicked up by traffic, you probably ran into an older section of I-80 that will get the better pavement this spring.

(Source: http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_14779911?nclick_check=1)

Unfortunately neither open-graded asphalt or rubberized asphalt are common practice on Oahu.

There is an additional advantage of open-graded asphalt that Caltrans did not mention: Noise reduction.

Environmentally, open-graded asphalt reduces road noise for drivers, passengers and those who work, live or play near a busy highway. Studies have found that open-graded asphalt pavements, when compared to traditional dense-graded asphalt pavements, reduce road noise by 3 to 7 decibels (dBA) which make them a viable alternative to noise walls for areas with moderate noise problems.

Source: Asphalt Intitute, http://www.asphaltinstitute.org/public/engineering/PDFs/Construction/Open_Graded_Asphalt_Surfaces_Offer_.pdf)

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Panos Prevedouros on the Rick Hamada Program

For nearly three years now and on 40 or so Mondays per year I join political columnist and radio host Richard Hamada, III on KHVH 830 AM The Rick Hamada Program for a humorous, interesting and if I may say so, insightful, discussion on Honolulu city's issues and challenges relating to traffic and infrastructure, as well as on cost-effective ideas to mitigate these problems.

Here is a sample of the first four shows in 2010. Visit HonoluluTownPodcast.Com for more, including the "dark side", that is, Mayor Mufi's rail propaganda on the Mike Buck Show on KHVH.

Monday, September 28, 2009

Road Work Symposium: Fixing Roads or Buying Votes?

HONOLULU ROAD WORK SYMPOSIUM
Tuesday, Sep. 29, 2009, 10:30 a.m to 3:00 p.m.
Neal S. Blaisdel Center

"The Symposium will outline the City and County of Honolulu’s Road Work project schedules and opportunities totaling over $100M of work." Another colorful flier from the City touting a forthcoming infrastructure achievement. How about a reality check?

Oahu has 1628 miles of roads and only 88 centerline miles of it are its freeways. Then there are other major highways and a few arterials that are state's jurisdiction (e.g., Pali, Likelike, Kal and Kam Highways.) It leaves the city with about 1,400 miles of roadways.

Good paving jobs average about $250,000 per lane mile in Hawaii. Reconstruction could cost twice as much, and several road segments on Oahu do need reconstruction.


Let's make some basic assumptions to get a handle on Oahu's road repair liability. Let's assume that only half of the roads need fixing, and that the average road is 4 lanes wide. We have long avenues that are 5, 6 or more lanes wide and those are the ones that are in critical need for repair. The majority of the county roads are two lanes mostly comprised of neighborhood access and collector streets.

So here is a rough total for road repair costs (not for bridges, just for pavements):

1400 x 0.5 x 4 x $250,000 = $700 Million

Given that some city arteries need reconstruction, we come up with a rough total of one billion dollar budget for pavement repairs. This estimate means that about $100 million per year in today's worth is needed for the next 10 years to fix half of Oahu roads and by then the other half of the roads would fixing.

Indeed road maintenance is a perpetual job. This is the reason why cities and states which have their act together have firmly established Pavement Management Systems. We don't.


After five years in office mayor Mufi Hannemann comes up with a one time $100M announcement. Way too late and too little to improve Honolulu roads from being third worst in the nation, but a well timed expenditure of taxpayer money for political gain.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Honolulu's Pavements Among Nation's Worst

It is no secret that the roads on Honolulu are generally in mediocre to poor condition. A 2009 report of the American Association of State and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) makes this negative distinction official: Honolulu is 4th worst in the nation.

As a consequence of this, the average vehicle in Honolulu suffers about $700 in annual road damage in tires, suspension, etc. The analysis of this report does not include the cost of additional accidents and crashes that roads in poor condition cause.


The report states that when a road is good, the investment of $1 to keep it in good condition averts the expenditure of $6 to $14 in payments necessary to bring it from a poor condition to good condition. Unfortunately for Honolulu, the habitual raiding of the Highway Fund by the Legislature and the habitual neglect of the roads for 10+years of the Harris and Hannemann administrations could not have come at a worse time, since now we are in a belt tightening mode.


However, I need to remind our reader that on Oahu, it is not a priority to fix our roads or to reduce congestion on our roads or to provide work for projects our laborers can do (fix and build roads.) The priority (for now) remains to waste five-plus billion dollars on a rail system with 20 stops, for which specialized imported labor will be necessary.

A summary of the report and the report itself can be found here: http://roughroads.transportation.org. The pavement quality table is shown below.


Monday, June 8, 2009

Hawaii Highway Modernization ...

... or (unfortunately,) the failure of enacting it.

A fairly ambitious bill was submitted to the Hawaii State Legislature this year but it died in committee. The Bill would have raised gasoline and weight taxes to collect about three billion dollars and along with one billion in federal funds was planning to do a large number of shovel-ready projects to improve congestion bottlenecks, retrofit or replace old bridges, mitigate rockfall sites, improve pavements, etc. Highlights and the list of projects can be found here: Hawaii Highway Modernization. The bill may be taken up again at the 2010 legislative session.

A TV program was developed to discuss this lost opportunity. It is available in four parts on YouTube, as follows.

State Representative Cynthia Thielen Discusses Transportation with Professor Panos D. Prevedouros

Part 1 -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhRRadWez0w

Part 2 -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wfYAW-XihY

Part 3 -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ytn2DoIiYw

Part 4 -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiDf53G204Y

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Pavement Maintenance

Hawaii at 0.39, had the second lowest score in the nation in Interstate Pavement Serviceability in 2004. The average score of Pavement Serviceability in the U.S was 0.82. The situation is even worse for Honolulu.

Pavement Serviceability Index or PSI is a standard pavement quality metric ranging from one (1) excellent to zero (0) for terrible. In 2006, for 66 urban areas with population of 500,000 or more:

• Los Angeles had the lowest average score of 0.16 and San Francisco-Oakland with next lowest score of 0.17. Honolulu and San Jose had the third lowest score of 0.19.
• There were 25 urban areas within the score range of 0.25 to 0.50 including Albuquerque with a score of 0.39.
• There were 29 urban areas within the score range of 0.51 to 0.75 including Salt Lake City with a score of 0.59.
• There were nine urban areas within the score range of 0.76 to 0.87 including Jacksonville with a score of 0.86 and Tampa-St. Petersburg with the highest score of 0.87.

As much as a 71% saving can be realized if preventive maintenance were performed in a systematic way. The core of PMS is rating the pavement surface quality for every street in the city. From that the system recommends a program of annual expenditures that will help maintain good quality streets at that level or higher by preventing or reducing the wear from weather and vehicles.

To keep a road in good condition its surface needs to be maintained. Failure to maintain the surface leads to failure of the entire layer of pavement and sometimes the subsurface base, forcing the replacement of the entire pavement layer with new asphalt – an expensive process. An easy way to think of pavement (asphalt) preservation is to liken it to changing engine oil in your car. If you change the oil on reasonable recommended schedule, generally, the engine will last a long time. The same goes for a properly built street – with a refresher coat every 7-10 years it will last twice as long as normal.

Breaks in the surface can lead to hairline crack formation which allows the entrance of water into and below the pavement, leading to a shortened pavement life and early failure of the pavement subgrade base. Seal coating restores the oxidized surface and seals the pavement to prevent water entrance as well as adding a new wear course and adding improved traction.

Seal coats such as chip seals are more environmentally sound than paving. Three applications of chip seals over a 30 year period will use less than half the rock and oil of a conventional asphalt overlay.

One mile of collector arterial can be chip sealed in one week. If it had been repaved, it would have taken one month. Sweeping of loose gravel begins immediately after the chip is laid down eliminating the need to close the road to traffic. A final top coat of light oil is placed on the chip a few days after the chip is laid down, locking down any remaining loose chips.

Repaving of a typical residential street with three inches of pavement, in 2008 dollars, runs the range of $25 – 35/square yard, depending on the complexity of the project. In comparison, chip seal runs $3-3.50/square yard. In a 30 year life cycle (assuming three chip seals) that translates to as much as a 71% savings. Savings sorely needed to rebuilt streets that have failed, improve substandard width streets, put in sidewalks and take care of aging traffic signals.

Maintenance and rehabilitation can be cheaper if performed early and methodically instead of lately and on a random, ad hoc or “plotical whim” basis. For example, Orange County, California implemented a Pavement Management System (PaMS) two decades ago. Before its implementation, 50% of the pavements in the network were in good condition and 24% in bad condition; while twenty years later 78% were in good condition and 5% in bad condition, while at the same time both funding and personnel in maintenance decreased (Allen and Lorick, 2007). Additionally, the Michigan Department of Transportation has calculated that savings in maintenance are $6 for every dollar invested in Pavement Management (National Cooperative Highway Research Program, 2004).

The sketch below clearly shows the deterioration of pavement condition over time.




Pavement Management “involves the identification of optimum strategies at various management levels as well as the implementation of these strategies. It is an all-encompassing process that covers all those activities involved in providing and maintaining pavements at an adequate level of service. These range from initial information acquisition to the planning, programming and execution of new construction maintenance, and rehabilitation, to the details of individual project design and construction; to periodic monitoring of pavements in-service”.

Pavement Management may use a large number of measurements for distresses in asphalt pavements: Alligator Cracking, Bleeding, Block Cracking, Bumps and Sags, Corrugation, Depression, Edge Cracking, Joint Reflection Cracking, Lane/Shoulder Drop-Off, Longitudinal and Transverse Cracking, Patching and Utility Cut Patching, Polished Aggregate, Potholes, Railroad Crossing, Rutting, Shoving, Slippage Cracking, Swell, Weathering and Raveling.

Pavement Management has been successful on many occasions, e.g., in the Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) which has used a PaMS since 1980. The ADOT found out that the roads after PaMS implementation deteriorate later than prior to its implementation. The Tolerable Roughness Level (93in/mi) at 16.8 years of age, instead of the 14.8 years they used to last before reaching that level prior to the implementation of PaMS. In the case of the Interstate Roads of the State of Arizona, the pavements last 31.6 years within the Tolerable Roughness Level once the PaMS was implemented and before PaMS they reached that level at 18.9 years of age. The savings in budget provided by PaMS in Arizona are estimated to be up to $423 million during the 16 year period that last from 1981 to 1996. The benefit/cost ratio procured by PaMS is 51 to 1.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Honolulu Pavements ala Mufi

Hannemann just dropped his latest propaganda piece. In it he claims that while in office he:

- Filled more than 244,323 potholes
- Resurfaced 566 lane miles
- Spent $124 million on road rehabilitation

My take on these "accomplishments" is as follows:

(1) That's nearly a quarter million ways of patching pavements the wrong way and at a huge labor and material cost. And with a poor visual, safety and ride-quality result.

(2) This includes fixes on 2, 4 and 6 lanes roads. Using a 4-lane road as an average and three years in the office, yields a tiny resurfacing record of 47 road miles per year. The city will never catch up with its $1.8 billion pavement repair backlog. Worse yet, most of the lane miles claimed are likely to be long patches and superficial half inch jobs which begin to deteriorate immediately and last but a few years. (A properly rehabilitated or resurfaced road will last a minimum of 10 and up to 25 years.)

(3) Only in the 2009 budget Hannemann allocated $77 million on rehabilitation and that's too low. Having spent $124 M in three years shows that he does not have a clue when it comes to priorities. And given his traditional thuthiness with the facts, this item may also include the cost of doing the potholes and resurfacing!

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

A Good Way to Spend Five Billion in Honolulu

Someone asked me this: If you save Oahu the five plus billion dollars that rail would cost in local taxes, how would you spend it? Here is my response.

Five Billion Dollars is a mighty sum and lots of good things can be done with it. Recall that five billion is 5,000 million. Also recall that Charlotte, North Carolina built its light rail with 450 million dollars. Less than $100 million of the rail system's cost burdened the city’s taxpayers; the rest was contibuted from state and federal resources.

Honolulu plans to do the same for a cost of over 6,400 million dollars for 30 miles of rail, with five billion dollars of tax burden for Oahu’s 400,000 taxpayers. The city recently announced at a City Council session that there will be budget shortfalls for both construction and maintenance. They said that budget shortfalls will be covered by increased property taxes.

I estimate that property taxes need to increase by at least 40% to cover construction and operation shortfalls as soon as the GET 4.5% sunsets to 4.0% in 2022.

I do not plan to increase any taxes in four years. My budget plan for investing five billion dollars of local taxes on local infrastructure is as follows:



  1. Assuming that the already expended $0.5 billion has been spent on good and necessary work, then $1.0 billion to bring our sewers to a B+ state.
  2. About $1 billion for two trash factories that will allow us to close Waimanalo Gulch landfill and generate valuable recyclables with only 2% if trash being actual waste. We can actually afford to ship this little residual waste to mainland landfills. This billion also includes monies to convert the WG landfill into a methane and photovoltaic energy producing unit.
  3. About $1.5 billion to bring city pavements to a C+ condition. Right now we are at a solid F, since Honolulu ranks 3rd bottom out of 67 cities with a population of 500,000 or more in road quality.
  4. About $0.5 billion for traffic operations quick (but effective) fixes such as traffic light synchrolization, underpasses, spot lane additions and other localized bottleneck fixes.
  5. About $0.5 billion on general community welfare including fixes to parks, beaches, athletic complexes, libraries, pools, and playgrounds.
  6. And $0.5 billion matched by a federal and private partnership to form a $1.0 billion financing block to build 10-12 miles of reversible high occupancy express lanes from the H-1 and H-2 freeway merge to Airport, Kalihi and Iwilei which will solve the supermajority of the congestion issues on the Leeward corridor.


For more details and interesting movies and posts about my ideas and 21st century solutions, please visit my main campaign site at panosforprogress.com and its HQ (digital headquarters) section.

Friday, July 18, 2008

Potholes... Hawaii 2nd worst in the nation!


Why do we have so many potholes here on Oahu? Why are our roads among the worst in the nation? These are questions many of us ask when our cars hit yet another pothole.

There are two common types of pavements: asphalt and concrete. Concrete pavements are strong and durable. They are expensive to build. They are used mostly for freeways and for bus lanes. City streets are almost always asphalt pavements.

Pavements are structures. Like buildings carry people and furniture, pavements carry traffic. The weight of traffic makes the pavements flex. After millions of flexes, the pavement cracks. If it is not maintained before or as soon as it cracks, potholes appear.

A pot hole is a complete failure of the pavement. The more potholes there are, the more we conclude that proper pavement maintenance is not done. How does a crack become a pothole? With the help of water and traffic.

Water gets in the crack, traffic passes over it, the pavement flexes downward and that pushes the water upward which loosens and carries pavement material through the crack. Soon enough, a quarter-inch wide crack is a one-inch-wide crack and with enough rain and traffic, a large pothole can appear in just a few days.

What’s a good way to maintain pavements? There are many ways:

1: Crack filling, where crews have a system to patrol roads and fix them.

2: Chip sealing, where a special thin layer is added every 4 or 5 years while the pavement is in excellent or very good condition. This can keep a pavement excellent practically forever if it is done on schedule.

3: Pavement management system where each mile of roadway is in a database along with its condition and annual traffic load. Then, pavement repair and replacement jobs can be prioritized and done regularly and on schedule.

A good thing about asphalt pavements is recycling. The top layer of pavement can be recycled forever, which cuts down on the amount of stones we need to quarry. In addition, used tires can be added to the mix. This is very useful, because tire rubber is among the least biodegradable products.

When chipped and used in asphalt mixes, tires become 100% recyclable and they make pavements cheaper and quieter.

How bad are our pavements? The Honolulu Advertiser pointed out in March 2008 “Honolulu roads rated 2nd-worst in nation”.

The City and County of Honolulu is many years behind modern pavement practice. They use very old methods to patch potholes. This is a waste of labor and the results are poor.

They deploy very expensive ½-inch overlays on damaged pavement. This basically makes a road “look good” for a year or so. Like these two:






They do not have a pavement management system. They do not know how heavy traffic is on every road.

They do not use chip sealing and they do not do crack filling.

Basically, they are fighting a losing battle by using expensive band-aids on or very sick roads.

Honolulu’s pavements need a complete overhaul. More than one billion dollars is required to bring city road pavements to a near-excellent condition.