You are invited to a ROADEX webinar on new technologies on gravel and forest road surveys to be presented by Dr Timo Saarenketo from Roadscanners Finland. Please see below the detailed description of what will be covered.

Feel free to forward the invitation to anyone in your organization, and to people who you think might be interested to the webinar.

Roughly 1/3 of the road networks in ROADEX area are gravel roads and most of the forest roads in the world are also unpaved roads. Even though their traffic volume is low, their importance to local economies is great.

Due to their nature these roads have very light structures and are exposed to seasonal changes and their condition can vary from very smooth and comfortable ride to extremely poor or even unpassable condition.

With good maintenance practices gravel and forest roads can be kept in much better shape. The problem however is that almost all the survey methods used so far have been based on subjective visual condition analysis and that is why no objective or repeatable condition has been collected from the roads. This presentation will focus on presenting some of the new techniques such as 3D accelerometers, laser scanners and GPR techniques in the analysis of functional and structural condition of gravel and forest roads.

This webinar will act also as a preview of the coming ROADEX eLearning package that will be published in January-February 2023.

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You are invited to a ROADEX webinar on climate change to be presented by Craig Love. Please see below the detailed description of what will be covered.

Feel free to forward the invitation to anyone in your organization, and to people who you think might be interested to the webinar.

Climate change is at the forefront of our lives every day. The declaration of the climate emergency across the world and ambitious net-zero targets emphasise the need for all of us to take action. But how can we can make robust and informed decisions about tackling climate change if we don’t have an understanding of the issue?

What is climate literacy and how can it help?
Essentially, climate literacy is having an understanding of the influence you can have on our climate, and an understanding of how our climate can, in turn, influence you and our wider society. This can help you to:

• assess scientifically credible information about climate
• make informed decisions
• embed sustainability into your work
• feel more confident addressing climate change
• communicate about climate in a meaningful way

Craig Love is an internationally recognised climate change mitigation and adaptation practitioner, experienced in delivering sustainability in the public and transport infrastructure sector. He is a Chartered Environmentalist and a Member of the IES, Energy Managers Association, Permanent International Association of Road Congresses (PIARC) Technical Committee 1.4 Climate Change & Resilience of Road Networks and sits on the Adaptation Scotland board. He has an MSc in Carbon Management and a PgCert in both Climate Change Management and Carbon Innovation. Craig is currently a Climate Change and Sustainability Manager at Transport Scotland, overseeing a team responsible for corporate climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation and resilience, the circular economy, noise and flooding.

Craig developed Transport Scotland’s Carbon Management Plan 3rd Edition, which has seen the agency’s corporate emissions reduce by over 70% in six years. He has also provided contributions to both the UK Climate Risk Independent Assessment (CCRA3) and Climate Ready Scotland: climate change adaptation programme 2019-2024 and was a member of Adaptation Scotland’s Expert Working group who helped to develop Scotland Adapts: A Capability Framework for a Climate Ready Public Sector.

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The Remibar project (Remediation of migratory barriers in Nordic/fennoscandian watercourses) aims to improve the continuity of watercourses in Sweden. The project was funded by EU Commissions LIFE+ programme. Watercourses are ecological corridors in the landscape and are regularly crossed by roads and railways, sometimes causing ecological problems particularly where culverts and bridges are not constructed to an appropriate standard. Poorly installed culverts can pose obstacles and make it hard and sometimes impossible for fish and other species to migrate. The ReMiBar project offers several ideas to overcome such migration barriers and its knowledge is therefore very important when working with improving and constructing new rural roads, especially when dealing with water and drainage.

Learn more about the project by following this link to the ReMiBar website.

www.trafikverket.se/en/startpage/planning/Remibar

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The ROADEX Network has published an external independent academic assessment on the benefits and savings of the alternative road asset management strategies suggested by ROADEX over the period 1998 – 2012. The aim of the work, by Professor Pekka Leviäkangas, was to critically evaluate the 2012 ROADEX IV summary report “ROADEX benefits and savings – achieving more with less”.  The evaluation looked into the ROADEX results, methodologies and approaches, with the main focus on the economic and financial matters of the published ROADEX strategies.

The evaluation was both critical and complimentary of the works of ROADEX, and gives excellent guidance for the current ROADEX NETWORK partners for future collaborations.

This report can be downloaded from the ROADEX website.

The Finnish Transport Agency together with the Lappi and Keski-Suomi Centres for Economic Development, Transport and the Environment, Lapland and Roadscanners Oy from Finland has started a new PEHKO 2015-2025 project with the emphasis on testing new methods that could improve the efficiency and productivity of the management of paved roads. The project will commence in 2015 in selected maintenance contract areas in Lapland and Central Finland. The ambitious goal of this 10 year R&D pilot project will be to cut down the annual paving costs in the areas by 40-50% from the current level.

The basic idea of the PEHKO project will be to improve the practices and policies of paved road maintenance and management, and the technologies developed and tested in the ROADEX projects will have a great role. The aim of the project will be to enhance the productivity of funding investments and improve the condition of the paved road network, or at least keep it at current levels with less resources. This goal will be achieved by focusing on three targets:

1) Improving the daily drainage maintenance standards for paved roads. This will lead to increased pavement lifetimes and lower annual paving costs.
2) Applying new NDT (non-destructive testing) road survey technologies in the diagnostics of paved roads allowing the engineers involved to focus their rehabilitation measures exactly on the problem sections and address the roots of the problems rather than just treating the symptoms.
3) Changing maintenance policies from reactive to proactive maintenance. This will mean that maintenance crews will fix the potential problem sections before serious pavement damages appear.

ROADEX Network Partners commissioned Roadscanners in 2014 to carry out a prestudy on the “Effect of Axle and Tyre Configurations on Pavement Durability”. The resulting ROADEX Network report provides a general information package on the effect of different truck options, axle configurations, tyre types and tyre pressure options on pavements, other road structures and subgrades. A secondary goal of the prestudy was to model the stresses and strains, and perform  calculations of pavement lifetimes, caused by the different variables on typical pavement structures within the ROADEX Network area. The report also summarizes the key results of research carried out in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Scotland and other countries regarding the effect of heavy traffic on pavement durability.

This report can be downloaded from the ROADEX website.

Northland Resources Ltd opened an iron ore mine in Kaunisvaara in Pajala municipality in Northern Sweden in 2013. Their plan was to annually transport five million tonnes of mined ore concentrate on trucks to a new terminal in Svappavaara from where it would be hauled by train to Narvik harbour in Norway. The ROADEX project was involved before mine was opened in an impact analysis of a range of heavy truck options on the transport route that had relatively weak structures. After the mine was opened Roadscanners performed a follow up survey on selected sections of the route in order to compare the types of damages that appeared on the road.

The follow-up measurements 2013 and 2014 showed that, as was predicted  before the start of the heavy haulage, the surveyed road sections had experienced extensive deformations and damages after the commencement of the heavy traffic. The greatest rutting and damages were located in the areas of highest risk classes 4 and 5, especially in those places where the subgrade changed from strong to weak. In addition to the Mode 2 rutting caused by the weak subgrade, Mode 1 rutting deformation in the base course was also detected in many places. Problems with frost action and thawing of ice lenses were also evident in the sections.

Regrettably the mine was closed in 2014 due to financial difficulties and the follow-up surveys are not expected to continue until the mine re-opens operations.

The Icelandic version of the elearning lesson on “Environmental Considerations for Low Volume Roads” is now available on the ROADEX website. This lesson has now been translated into the four ROADEX partner languages of Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, as well as English. See: Fáfarnir vegir og umhverfismál