If you know me, you know I’ll take any opportunity to work a Bruce lyric into a post. But, unlike the song, a Cadillac isn’t tearing up the highway. The machine used is called a rotomill or cold planer. In the photograph, it is working overnight to remove a portion of a parking lot asphalt […]
The First Smart Road?
Roads have been constructed for centuries, but have intelligent roads been around for as long? A good case can be made by examining the above photograph. The roadway is found in the ancient Roman city of Pompeii. The Romans were on to something here and you’ll see similar approaches used in modern engineering. You can […]
The Old Plank Road
Throughout history, roads have been built with local materials. The Romans used mountain and volcanic rock quarried into slabs. Gravel and cobbles were used for early roads in the United States. Where available, thick oil was poured over compacted aggregate to produce an all-weather Macadam road. For a large portion of the United States, timber […]
The 2,000-Year-Old Road
It has been said that ancient Roman roads lasted over 2,000 years but nowadays, it seems our roads do not seem to last more than decade or so. Why is that? There are many reasons for short performance lives, but for now, we will focus on the Roman road cross section. After comparing the ancient […]
Pavements Keep Us Out of the Mud
My favorite graduate school professor, Marshall Thompson, PhD, professor emeritus at the University of Illinois, had a folksy way of boiling down engineering concepts to the basics. “Pavements keeps us out of the mud.” I would sit in the reception area of Talbot Laboratory during lunchtime, reading the Wall Street Journal, drinking coffee and overhearing […]
