Road Engineering
1.
Characteristics
Highway engineering is an engineering discipline
branching from civil engineering that consists of the planning, design,
construction, operation, and maintenance of roads, bridges, and tunnels to
ensure face and effective transportation of people and goods. Highway
engineering became prominent towards the latter half of the 20th century during post world war-II time. Standards of highway engineering are
continuously being improved. Highway engineering must take into account future
traffic flows, design of highway intersection/interchanges, geometric alignment
and design, highway pavement materials and design, structural design of
pavement thickness, and pavement maintenance.
Roads are used by different types of road vehicles, such as
passenger cars, buses, trucks, two and three-wheeled automobiles, pedal cycles,
etc. Road transport infrastructure requires the smallest preliminary investment
in comparison to that for the infrastructure of other transportation modes. It
offers complete freedom to the users to make use of the roadway facilities at
any times convenient to them Its possible to travel directly from the
respective origin-places to the destination-places by road vehicles. For short
distances, in particular, road transport saves time significantly. One of the
most important things is that roadway transport is the only model that offers
the facilities to the section of the society. For the gradual development of
any county, it needs a well-planned roadway network connecting all the towns
and villages. It is essential to link all the roads between the villages and
the towns. In general, the location which is developing day by day has to
upgrade the roadway transportation system to a higher level, both in length and
quality to meet the increasing demand. The underdeveloped road conditions have contributed
to the setback in the growth of agricultural, industrial, and commercial zones
in the country, in the past. The economic condition of the vast majority of the
population in the rural areas has continued to remain poor and hence they have
not been able to either buy vehicles of their own or to make proper use of the
existing transportation facilities.
2.
Scope of Road Engineering
The pavements are generally constructed on low embankments,
Drainages and maintenance problems are kept in mind while aligning the
pavements. The term road or roadway thus constructed is therefore termed
‘highway’ and science and technology dealing with the roadway is generally
called ‘Highway Engineering’ and ‘Highway Technology’.
Types
of roads:
The roads are generally divided into two categories,
depending on whether they can be used during the various season of the year:
(i)
All-weather roadway and
(ii)
Fairweather roadways
All-weather
roadways are those which can be used without disturbance at any time of the
year. These roadways are expected at major waterway crossing where some
interruption to traffic is permissible up to a certain specific extent. The
traffic may be disturbed on ‘fair weather roads’ during the rainy season at the
causeway where streams/canals may flow over the roadway. The roads are divided
as ‘paved roads’ and ‘up-paved roads’ depending on the type of the carriageway.
The roads may be classified as ‘surfaced roads’ and ‘unsurfaced roads’
depending on the type of surfacing of the pavement provided. The surfaced roads
are those which have bituminous or cement concrete on their surface. The roads
which are not surfaced with a bituminous or cement concrete are called
un-surface roads.
The roads are generally classified base
on the following:
(a) Traffic
volume
(b) Load
transported or tonnage
(c) Location
and function
The
classification based on tonnage has been arbitrarily fixed by different
institutions. Based on the traffic volume, the roads are categorized as heavy,
medium, and low volume roads. These terms are relative to each other and so the
limits under every class should be clearly defined and expressed as vehicle per
day or ‘annual average daily traffic, etc. In the same way, the classification base
on load or tonnage is also relative and the roads may be categorized as class
I, II, etc., or class A, B, etc. and the limits may be expressed interns to
tonnes per day. The classification base on location and function should
therefore be a more acceptable and preferable classification method for the particular
country.
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