Of course, it cannot be said that only outdated road construction technologies are used in our country. On the contrary, in recent years, road builders have begun to actively employ some advanced solutions in road construction (especially federal roads). These include new materials, the purchase or rental of high-performance specialized road machinery, and new methods of organizing work.
But overall, innovations are slow to take root in the industry. Mainly because 'new products' do not always fit into our outdated regulatory framework that forms the basis of all road construction.
No matter how hard road builders try to do something in a new way, in their work they are forced to rely on the current regulatory legislation. For example, the GOST for bitumen has not been updated for several decades. While regulating the requirements for the quality indicators of one of the main ingredients of asphalt concrete mixture, it completely fails to take into account a number of important physical properties. For instance, viscosity.
According to the same GOST, the quality of bitumen is determined by the 'needle penetration depth at t +25°C'. With such a 'precise' methodology, the quality of any bitumen mixtures can be adjusted to formal regulatory requirements through simple technological manipulations, even with unsatisfactory composition of raw materials. As a result, road bitumens very often do not meet specific operating conditions — the standard values of their brittleness temperature contradict the temperature characteristics of the local climate.
The situation is similar with GOSTs for road pavements. They were developed back in the USSR era, based on the characteristics of the country's vehicle fleet at that time. Today, the actual loads on the road surface have increased many times over. Moreover, federal legislation permits the operation of freight vehicles with a maximum axle load of 11.5 tons, while most of our roads remain in the past century — with a maximum load of 6 tons.
As the road builders themselves admit, one of the key shortcomings of the existing standardization system is its specification-based structure. The standards include detailed characteristics of particular products (shape, size, material, etc.). This leads to innovative technologies and materials being 'outlawed'. One either has to individually approve each new technology (material) or change the standard itself.
You will agree, for most companies this is an impossible task. For them, the simplest solution would be to rent a backhoe loader or another asphalt paver as an addition to the existing fleet, rather than introducing new construction methods, even if more advanced.
What is to be done? There is only one way out — the existing system must be radically changed. Moreover, the new version of the updated Russian system of standards and technical regulation should ensure the unhindered application of new technologies and materials, while maintaining the necessary performance characteristics of the final product.
By the way, these very ideas underlie the so-called 'new European approach', according to which a unified standardization system being implemented in the EU is being created.
PR