ROADEX – Benchmarking Low Traffic Volume Road Condition Management in EU Northern Periphery Area

The road districts of Lapland in Finland, Northern Region in Sweden, Trombs County in Norway, and the Highlands in Scotland have initiated a technical, trans-national collaborative project ROADEX. The aim of this collaboration is, through the exchange of experience, to identify the best practice strategies and develop procedures for dealing with common challenges associated with the maintenance of low traffic volume road networks in sparsely populated northern regions. The focus of the ROADEX sub project A (SPA) is on the low traffic volume roads of the partner districts. One of the subproject's special interests is the use of traffic restrictions in the partner districts and techniques to improve bearing capacity of these roads. This paper presents the results from phase I of the project, a comparison study of each road district's current policies and techniques in addressing the issues, and also briefly summarises the results of the phase II field tests, which focused on the standard and best practise structures as well as testing the different kinds of special structures utilised in the road districts. The results of the Roadex subproject "Road Condition management" show that, in spite of similar basic problems in each partner district, each country has emphasized slightly different strategies and techniques when trying to resolve bearing capacity problems in their low traffic volume road network. For the covering abstract see ITRD E118503.