Effectiveness of Early Rehabilitation of Pavement Confirmed on a Japanese Expressway

Early rehabilitation is considered an ideal strategy for managing road pavements, as it is expected to ensure longer durability to minimize the life-cycle cost. However, such a practice has not much been adopted, so its effectiveness is even difficult to understand. As a step toward implementation, how many years rehabilitated pavement have so far sustained was investigated, using NEXCO-PMS, which collects not just road surface monitoring data but also all segments of pavement repair projects for decades. In categorizing the projects into groups that have the same rehabilitation history on a Japanese toll roadway, a tendency that earlier dates of rehabilitation give longer durability in problematic sections was confirmed, with the assumption that bearing capacity of porous pavement deteriorates fast. It was also revealed that control of road surface indices such as rutting and crack ratio at a lower level is essential. Moreover, in sections where rehabilitation is forced to be done repeatedly, it is important to keep crack ratio at a lower level to achieve earlier rehabilitation.