Assessing the Effects of Heavy Vehicles on Local Roadways

This report documents the development of an analysis procedure and an associated computation tool to estimate the impact of heavy vehicles on local agency pavements. The heavy vehicles of interest are those which were not anticipated at the time the pavement structure was designed, but which cause additional damage and thus create the need for rehabilitation or reconstruction sooner than expected. These unexpected heavy vehicles could be generated by new industrial facilities, mining activities, changes in urban waste collection patterns, temporary heavy construction in a limited geographical area, or for other reasons. The tool described in this report implements the procedure, and provides users with the ability to analyze a single roadway segment (for detailed impacts estimates) or an agency's entire network (for summary statistics over the system). The tool provides estimates of the percent of originally intended life that may be used by the unanticipated vehicles, the additional pavement structure that would have been required at construction to accommodate the additional vehicles, and the additional damage that they cause. The tool is contained in a macro-enabled Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and does not need additional files or external functionality to conduct an analysis.