"Chipsealing" is not road repair

This may belong in the OT "rant thread" but its auto related, so I'll leave it here. Background: My home state (MI) is blessed with the trifecta of 1. no money 2. a wicked frost cycle and 3. almost no overweight truck enforcement. End result, our roads pretty much everywhere are terrible. In the last few months, my county has been "chipsealing" pretty much every major surface road. For those unfamiliar, this process involves laying down a thin layer of asphalt then throwing small (about pea sized) loose stone on top of it. IN THEORY the stone is then pushed into the asphalt while its still hot with a roller and it creates a new, bonded road surface. IN PRACTICE my county seems to allow the asphalt truck to get about a 1/2 mile ahead of the stone trucks (thereby depositing the stones on top of cool, solid asphalt rather than into hot, soft asphalt). Instead of really rolling the rock in, the roller drivers seem to do about 50 mph back and forth on the cold surface once or twice, then go on break. The end result is a whole bunch of loose rock which is incredibly slick, breaks windshields, chips paint and tears tires to bits. It sounds like there's a hailstorm going on under the car pretty much everywhere I drive these days.

Is this just crappy local contracting? (I.e. does this process work if done right?)

Yes, it does. It's a patch to extend the lifespan of the asphalt, but it does have to be done right. It's just emulsified oil going down, not a new layer of asphalt. There should be someone from the Michigan DOT overseeing the process and signing off on it. That's the guy you should be getting mad at.

Michigan's got some unusual rules for trucks. You have what are called "super dumps" with more axles than usual. Normal belly dumps can carry 22 tons, the super dumps can carry 50. And unload within a minute.

they use crushed granite on every road around here... they do it about a year after laying down the pavement.. it sucks at first, but after a few days they go thru and sweep up the excess rock chips. then they do it again after a certain amount of time- 5 years, i think.. i don't know how well it works, but i personally know of heavily traveled roads that haven't been repaved for over 20 years that are still in pretty good shape.

Chip sealing is designed to kill motorcyclists. I'm sure of it.

This is also a fun by-product of such a practice.

Here in my county, they are asphalting sections of the roads that are "bad" like craters the size of a b52 bad, but they then run over the whole thing with the oil/loose stone of the chip & seal....the excess rock sucks, but eventually it ends up ok. Until jan-feb roll around and the big farmers are using 100k+ lb semi's to sell their grain. Then its dodging potholes for a few years until they do it again.

We need to take a lesson from germany, and build a roadway worth a berkeley.

E36 M3, half the county roads by me are still gravel. I'd kill for them to chip-n-seal my road

They used to do it a lot around here. Not too much any more. I welll remember hating to drive down one of those roads afterward.

You are correct when you say it's not road repair. It's preventative maintenance, just like changing your oil. And just like changing your oil, if you don't do it you get to do way more expensive maintenance .

Now, that being said it can be done well, where thugs usually fall apart are

1: using the incorrect oil emulsion. ( this seems insane that a dot could do this, but I did lots of research into it and found at least in texas when it went poorly about 45% of the time the wrong oils was used. Whether its because they specified the wrong product to the contractor or he contractor gave them bad stuff, I don't know)

1. Over application of rock. THere are specified units (usually lbs per sf) the problem is the contractor/ inspector has to calculate how far a truck should go, and most of them just go with the "more is better" approach.

You already said the third one, waiting to long to apply and roll the gravel.

yamaha wrote: We need to take a lesson from germany, and build a roadway worth a berkeley.

We really dropped the ball after the war, not stealing all their highway engineers along with the rocket scientists.

I see there must be some other Civil Engineers on the board.

Kenny_McCormic wrote:

yamaha wrote: We need to take a lesson from germany, and build a roadway worth a berkeley.

We really dropped the ball after the war, not stealing all their highway engineers along with the rocket scientists.

Possibly.

People in this country already refuse to raise taxes to build/maintain infrastructure.

Do you think they'd go for it when the initial build cost is 3x as high?

bgkast wrote: I see there must be some other Civil Engineers on the board.

Some of us are married to head estimators/project managers for highway construction companies. She builds roads, I use roads.

You should see the pictures she has of the recent chipseal job on Hwy 550 near Ouray. They had almost half the rollers hanging over the abyss, because that's what you've gotta do...

When we were in Europe last year, we saw lots of construction on the secondary roads. Let's just say that OSHA regs are quite a bit different over there, even in Germany. I'm pretty sure we saw some chipsealing, too.

I'm not a road resurfacing engineer. but I have noticed a big change in the way roads get "fixed" since I was a kid. Road crews used to grind off a decent amount of asphalt before laying down anything new, sometimes taking the whole surface away and starting anew. These days it seems that they just lay down new stuff right on top of the broken stuff. In my mind, if you have 10 inches of asphalt that is cracked and broken, laying down 3 or 4 inches of anything on top of that won't last long. You need to repair the entire surface. Have you noticed how thick some roads are when the dig all the way through? Even here in N.C. with no frost heave, there are some roads that are amazingly crappy.

ncjay wrote: I'm not a road resurfacing engineer. but I have noticed a big change in the way roads get "fixed" since I was a kid. Road crews used to grind off a decent amount of asphalt before laying down anything new, sometimes taking the whole surface away and starting anew. These days it seems that they just lay down new stuff right on top of the broken stuff. In my mind, if you have 10 inches of asphalt that is cracked and broken, laying down 3 or 4 inches of anything on top of that won't last long. You need to repair the entire surface. Have you noticed how thick some roads are when the dig all the way through? Even here in N.C. with no frost heave, there are some roads that are amazingly crappy.

No disagreement from me. Problem is no one wants to be inconvenienced by road repairs. So, they just sit around and bitch on both sides of the fence.

US131 north of Grand Rapids, MI for a 7 mile stretch got repaired with a 12" thick concrete pour over the existing roadbed. It still is a POS road although much better then the original surface. Corridor G here in WV, just north of Danville, got the expansion joints cut out and ground down for a few more years of use out of it.

This topic can quickly turn into a patio building exercise, so I'll stop there.

Infrastructure budgets have been cut pretty dramatically in the past few years, so the DOTs are doing what they can with what they have. One thing you might not realize is that gas taxes are usually a fixed amount per gallon - but as oil prices go up, so does the cost of asphalt and the cost of laying it down. So the costs of paving are rising dramatically as the revenue stays flat or even decreases. In Colorado, the flat fee per gallon hasn't gone up since 1991. Imagine if your salary hadn't even been adjusted for inflation in 22 years - how would that affect your budget?

As for those oil costs, did anyone else notice a spike in concrete use starting in about 2008? That's because of the escalation in asphalt costs due to oil prices. It's getting really expensive to put down the black stuff. Asphalt can be recycled, but it still requires some fresh oil in the process.

Asphalt is flexible, so if the roadbed moves so does the surface. Unfortunately, fixing a roadbed isn't a minor thing.

Around here, CDOT isn't completely clueless so they do still mill roads before resurfacing if required.

In MS it's sop to use this method of paving on anything that isn't a highway or gravel. Since there is no winter (compared to other places) asphalt lasts years. After 15 or so years asphalt turns a reddish brown color.

Here's what I don't get. They tell us that if we dump our used oil on the ground we'll pollute the water table for 100 miles around, but they use oil on the roads all the time.

TN roads are some of the best in the country that I've driven. You can always tell when you hit the state line.

Went to Detroit for the first time for the auto show this year. I finally saw a frost heave. Sorry for you car guys up there.

When driving north on I-75 you know you've entered Michigan without even seeing the sign. Your suspension smacks the bumpstops and you need to turn up the radio to cover the noise.

At least the auto companies get a free 'rough road test area' right outside their office.

We don't have frost heave here in SE Virginia, but our roads suck. I-264, which runs from the oceanfront of VA Beach all the way past Norfolk, is concrete. But when they "fix" it, they patch it with asphalt, and what you end up with in essence is speed bumps in the middle of the highway. Not fun.

A lot of people don't rank Michigan roads the worst, because virtually nobody passes through the state to drive them, you go to MI to go to MI, or maybe Canada if you live in OH, IL or IN.

I've never heard it called chipsealing come to think of it. I always called it desperate gravel spreading. Seems to be a different process when they actually put a fresh thin layer on the road.

Say what you will about Florida; the roads here are often smooth as ice.

Driving to an autocross today I found that one of the roads they "fixed" about 2 months ago (which, thankfully has finally stopped peppering my car with handfuls of loose gravel) has already started to come apart because they didn't fix the underlying cracks and potholes. What a waste. And now, if complaints come in over the condition of the road, they will no doubt be met with "we just fixed that road."

Gearheadotaku wrote: When driving north on I-75 you know you've entered Michigan without even seeing the sign. Your suspension smacks the bumpstops and you need to turn up the radio to cover the noise.

Michigan roads are smoother than Ohio. You use a lot more concrete Route 23 is what I'm usually on and it's a dream. Like driving the Ohio Turnpike but no tolls.

Although concrete isn't always so hot. Drive I-70 west out of Columbus and aroudn the point you get to the Route 42 exit, the road turns into some of the loudest concrete ever. If you're stuck next to another vehicle, it can be deafening.