Reverting Back To Gravel?

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I don't live on a gravel road, but one drive down my road will make you wonder if going back to gravel would be better. I just learned that my town will NOT be paving any roads this year. Five years ago they paid the "outrageous price" of 22 dollars a ton. Today hot top is getting 400 dollars a ton.

To be honest with you, I don't see many paving jobs in the near future,and with concrete costs almost as high as hot top, I wonder if some of these secondary roads like mine will revert back to gravel?

My Grandfather, a 40 year Town Road Commissioner claims that once a person has a paved road, they will never allow it to revert back to gravel. Too many issues with washouts, dust and other gravel road issues. I would like to say that nessesity is the mother of invention, but I am not sure what would replace hot top. I am not sure we need anything, gravel works.

So what do you think, will more and more secondary roads revert back to gravel with the high cost of hot top?

Grading_Side_of_Road.jpg
 
around here, the secondary and tertiary roads which are paved, get 'Oiled' every so often, which involves a coat of tar with fresh pea gravel dumped on it while still hot. Signs for a few weeks warning of fresh oil, and lots of loose stone kicking up until it gets fully embedded.
 
around here, the secondary and tertiary roads which are paved, get 'Oiled' every so often, which involves a coat of tar with fresh pea gravel dumped on it while still hot. Signs for a few weeks warning of fresh oil, and lots of loose stone kicking up until it gets fully embedded.

Yup !!! Most of the secondary roads where I lived in Northern Ontario were "tar and gravel" and I think that it makes one of the best road surfaces you can get. It's a bit noisier than rolled asphalt, but if the gravel roadbed underneath it is properly prepared it lasts just as long and gives better traction in winter (IMNSHO !!)

cheers eh?
 
Maybe you can use Ned's Prius to fill in a hole once he gets his new "office".

I heard about the plight of Maine's roads on NPR awhile back. I hope you haven't broken a vehicle on your roads yet.

Good luck out there!
 
Around here they call it "tar and chip." But same thing.

We live on a gravel road. I'd rather have a really bad paved road than gravel. For 4 days this winter the bus wouldn't even come down our road. Pavement might get really bad, but it still does a better job keeping itself on top of the muck than gravel. Then there's regular mud--we can shovel it out of our garage by spring, and the dust when its dry. They put choloride down which helps, but not completely and it doesn't last forever.
 
, but if the gravel roadbed underneath it is properly prepared it lasts just as long and gives better traction in winter (IMNSHO !!)

cheers eh?

Theres the problem with most roads, proper preparation.
If you don't fix the base nothing will stay on top of it, not Blacktop, not concrete, not gravel.

The road in front of my place is a perfect example. They paved it 3 years ago and its coming apart down on the flat all ready. Why? because the water can't get away in a couple spots.

You get what you pay for and as long as you go for the cheapest price your always going to sacrifice quality.
 
Maybe you can use Ned's Prius to fill in a hole once he gets his new "office".

I heard about the plight of Maine's roads on NPR awhile back. I hope you haven't broken a vehicle on your roads yet.

Good luck out there!

They are pretty bad, but then again considering the freeze-thaw cycle they are subjected too, it only makes sense that they would be in bad shape. It was funny because the other day I was looking at Thorndike,Maine online and a blog of some woman came up. In it she wrote "we arrived in Thorndike after driving on the most pot-holed roads I ever traveled". Yep, no question,she was in Thorndike.

I tried to remedy the problem one time, but that did not workout so good. I had a big pot hole near my house so I decided to fill it. Since I did not have cold-patch, I used concrete. That worked good until the road heaved differently then the concrete patch job. The snowplow came down over the hill, hit it and shot him right sideways in the road. He was not happy. Now I fill them with gravel.:thumb:
 
Roads are interesting in that the University of Maine recently did a study and test of wooden bridges. There are so many new epoxies and engineered beams out there that they concluded wooden bridges could hold up traffic, and last a very long time. Myself I would like to see more of these projects. Maybe not some huge wooden suspension bridge across the Penobscot River, but on some of these smaller roads I could see wooden bridges as being viable?
 
Around here most repair work on city, county, and state roads now requires the use of RAP (recycled asphalt product) in varying proportions. They just rotomill the old surface, haul it back to the hot plant, run it through with the addition of a little extra oil, and lay it back on the road. It solves the problem of filling landfills with old asphalt and greatly reduces the need for liquid asphalt. Asphalt (or hot top or whatever the local term for it is where you live) is a product that can be recycled indefinitely and should be. Another thing around here that's changing fast is the cost of dumping things like concrete. It costs as much now to get rid of torn out concrete as it does to buy ready mix. But most concrete and gravel suppliers are now taking back torn out concrete, crushing it, recycling any rebar that's in it, and selling the crushed concrete as road base.
 
25 years ago in our community in SoCal the city re-did a bunch of the streets. They re-did our street with a huge machine the likes of which I had not seen used before nor since.

The machine was self propelled and somewhere around 8-10' wide, so it would do a lane at a time. The front was a huge gas fired burner that softened, if not melted, the asphalt. The roar was deafining. The heat was not unlike what a blast furnace must be like. Even though the grass between the sidewalk and street was about 4-5' away it was still burnt.

The middle part of the machine broke the asphalt up and scooped it up and inside somewhere it was ground up. A small amount of new oil and asphalt mix were added and on the back end this machine laid down a new road surface using mostly the old road surface. The rollers came in and you had a new road surface.

I would imagine that this method was very expensive back then when oil was $15/BBL, but it would seem it would be very cost effective today, both in material and time.

Karl
 
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I would imagine that this method was very expensive back then when oil was $15/BBL, but it would seem it would be very cost effective today, both in material and time.

Karl

Actually It probably only cost a little more than new asphalt even back then. Consider that if they put down all new it all had to be heated. So you either heat all the new asphalt or heat the old and less of the new.
Plus you don't have the expense of trucking away the grindings. I don;'t know about the rest of the country but around here grindings never ever go in the land fill.

When I worked for the local paver we trucked all grindings back to the yard to be used later for base material.

Several things do in asphalt.
Improper prep of the road bed
laying it down too thick at once. several thin layers are better than one thick one.
Not rolling it enough.
Not hot enough when its put down.
 
There are different ways to look at this issue. Paving county roads has been a political hot issue always in my area. Many gravel roads, including mine, have been paved. I have to admit, it saves on tires and we don't miss the dust.
DOWNSIDE: When we moved here the county population was about 12,000. Today, 31 years later and many roads paved, the population is over 42,000. There are times (about once an hour) when I wish they would just plow up all the roads and feeder highways.
 
Well come on up Frank, starting in November they plow our roads up...or at least my lawn beside the road. With 200 plus inches of snow this year, that meant a lot of trips with the snowplows, and even more spreading of sand. No exaggeration here, I did not rake the sand off my lawn this year, I put the grader blade on my tractor and graded it off the lawn. Eventually I pulled it into my driveway because I figured my gravel drive could use a free yard of new sand.

My road is paved/gravel as is the case on a lot of back roads here. You hit pavement for awhile, then it goes to dirt, and eventually back to pavement. Most of the gravel on these roads came off my Grandfather's gravel pit in 1968. (that pit now belongs to me) Either way I wish we could maintain our status quo in this town, but its pretty much dying off as the older people die off. I'm one of the younger ones that is too stubborn to leave.

So what the hey Frank, come on up and we'll raise cattle together and make woodworking projects, we both got experience in that! :)
 
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