Best Practices for Pavement Restoration of Open Cut Utility Installations/Repairs on Local Roadways in Northern Ohio
Start Date: September 2017
End Date: March 2019
Project Completed
Researcher: Mary Robbins, Ohio University
To download a copy of the Final Report, click
here.
Local Public Agencies often face the challenge of repairing their pavements after the installation or repair of subsurface utilities in the roadway. While minimizing the need to disturb the in-service pavements through advanced planning and coordination with other planned roadway work is ideal, open utility cuts are often unavoidable. The process of open utility cuts can result in a weakening of the foundation of the pavement, decreasing the expected life of the pavement section. Furthermore, the repaired pavement has been observed to degrade at a quicker rate than the surrounding pavement. The performance of a repair is influenced by a number of factors such as backfill materials, compaction of the backfill, season in which it was completed, and compaction of the asphalt surface, to name a few. Therefore, there is a need to develop a best practices matrix which can be used to improve the longterm performance of for pavement repair of open utility cuts.
The primary objective of this research is to identify the best practices for pavement restoration of open cut utility installation on local roads in urban areas to ensure low cost and long-term performance. It is expected this work will be an essential step for determining degradation rates of various pavement repair methods in the future. Additionally, it is anticipated a preliminary matrix of best practices will be developed for the selection of pavement restoration techniques for open cut utility installation based on specific site parameters.
It is anticipated that the results of this research will be directly implementable to local agencies in northern Ohio. By developing a user-friendly best practices matrix, local public agencies will be able easily to identify the repair methods that best suits their site specific parameters. Furthermore, the results of this research may be of interest to local public agencies in other areas of Ohio, as well as other states in the region and beyond.