Tag Archives: Highway Construction

Design Build Highway construction

A country’s economy is largely dependent on the quality of highways it has. You need big roads for huge vehicles to move on and these huge vehicles carry tons of weight on it. This means that you need highways that are strong and long lasting. Now in order to have long lasting highways you need a solid design to go with so that the construction of the highway goes in accordance to the design being made by the engineers and it remain strong to cater to thousands of vehicles that passes each day. There is something known as “Design Build” which is majorly used in construction of roads and highways. Here the design of the highway and its construction are done by the same entity. This means that no 2 different entities will be in the picture and the entire responsibility of the highways construction remains with only one construction company who has taken the order to construct the highway.

Earlier there was something known as Design Bid and Build that was followed by construction companies. In this particular scenario, one entity used to prepare the design of the highway and the other followed the design and worked on it. This created lot of problems with who will take the accountability if something goes wrong in the making of the project. The company who designed the project will point fingers at the company who has taken the construction work and the later will do the same on the company who has designed the project. In this case, the ultimate sufferer is the common people, the taxpayer of the country who has paid for the project and what they got in return is something worthless. This is why the concept of “Design Build” came into existence where the sole responsibility of the project remains with one company and if anything goes wrong then we know who to catch hold of.

Reduces overall costs of the project:-

Since there is only one company involved with the design and construction of the highway, we can expect a sizeable amount of reduction in the overall cost to the project. The construction company can work on the design and if it finds any changes to be made which happens quite often in a project of this magnitude can have a talk with the guys who did the design work for them and get it redesigned to their convenience. Had there been 2 entities, the redesigning thing would have taken huge sum of money from the project and have also made the process quite time consuming. Moreover there are chances of ego clash happening and if that happens it becomes more difficult to complete the highway on time.

The designers and the contractors are in sync:-

The Design Build concept has brought in a greater sense of responsibility by generating strong team bonding between the designers and the contractors. Since they belong to the same entity they have to work in sync with each other and it has been seen that people who work in a team derives better result that guys who work alone.

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Highway Construction and Maintenance to Reduce Accidents

We all know that road is a chief means of transport that helps in developing the nations in all aspects. Roads help the nations to unite with each other. Earlier, travelling from one nation to another by roadways is quite problematic for the people but as the world is developing technologically, different modernised equipments are discovered to make the roads smooth so that travel becomes easy. Highway construction is basically a part of the civil engineering course that comprises of planning, design, construction, operation and preservation of roads, flyovers, and subways to provide safe and time-saving travel to the people. The highway engineer planned and design highways keeping in the mind the augmenting problem of traffic. There are many methods in constructing highways.

Various Designs of Highway Construction

The location, configuration and the shape of the highways are decided in the designing phase by the engineers. The engineers design the highway after completing the phase of planning and development. The designs of the highways depend on three features that are human, vehicular and roadway. It is the duty of the highway engineers to design the road properly so that the number of the accident cases reduced a little bit. There are many designs involved in highway construction that are as follows:

  • Lane width
  • Alignment, super elevation and grades
  • Level of Service (LOS)
  • Design traffic volume
  • Design speed
  • Number of lanes
  • Sight distance
  • Cross section
  • Horizontal and vertical clearance

Other than these there is a kind of design that is known as flexible pavement design. This design comprises of three or four layers and the longevity of this type of designed highways is 15 to 20 years. The speciality of this design is that the pavement is made up of hot mix asphalt.  Rigid pavement design is another important genus of highway construction design. This design is chiefly employed in building airports and foremost highways. Portland Cement Concrete is the most common substance that is used in this design. The longevity of this sort of design is more than 30 years and is constructed in three layers.

Methods of highway construction

  • Subbase course construction is a technique of highway construction that is positioned between the subgrade and base course of the path. The width of the subbase usually comes in the range of 4 to 16 inches and it is planned to support the structure of the pavement. The different materials used in this method are gravel, crushed stone, fly ash, cement or lime.
  • Base course construction is another kind of highway construction mode that is placed directly under the surface course. The usual thickness of this base course varies from 4 to 6 inches. When the heavy loads are put on the surface of the pavement, this base course becomes powerful to handle that load. The materials utilised in base course construction are often applied with cement, calcium chloride, sodium chloride, fly ash or lime. This amalgamation helps the base course to carry the heavy load of the pavement properly.