Estimation of Pavement Damage Costs Attributed to Overloaded Heavy Goods Vehicles on Nigerian Highways

摘要

The paper assessed road pavement damage caused by heavy goods vehicles and their associated costs. The paper adopted pavement damage estimation technique that combined the HERS and the AASHTO. The highway sections of Lokoja-Abuja, Ilorin-Jebba and Abakiliki-Ogoja via Mbok roads were selected and data were collected through an axle-load survey, automatic traffic count and from secondary sources. The Metrocount Executive software and Excel Ad-ons were used in analyzing the data. The damaging effects of the HGV are more severe at Lokoja-Abuja Road (with g = 0.30), followed by Ilorin-Jebba Road (with g = 0.35) and Abakiliki-Ogoja Road (with g = 0.43). The heaviest overload of 94% of the 6-axle vehicles from cement carrying trucks plying the Lokoja-Abuja road could explain this intense damaging effect on the road pavement. Upon aggregation, the benchmark average annual maintenance costs per kilometre in Nigeria stands at ?143,182,853.55, while the average annual per-km maintenance costs attributed to Heavy Goods Vehicle traffic is ?101,385,881.57. Thus, the unit damage cost per ESAL-km was computed as ?5.65, ?5.70 and ?0.74 for Lokoja-Abuja, Ilorin-Jebba, and Abakiliki-Ogoja roads respectively. Hence, the benchmark per- equivalent single axle loads unit cost for the Nigerian roads is ?4.03. This figure represents the benchmark damaging cost of overload per equivalent single axle loads (ESAL) on the Nigerian road. This becomes a basis for control of excessive axle-load violations on the Nigerian roads.