Innovative initiatives in road design and construction in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Abstract

Paper presented at the 21st Annual South African Transport Conference 15 - 18 July 2002 "Towards building capacity and accelerating delivery", CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa.

Many parts of the Province KwaZulu-Natal lack suitable gravel sources, resulting in high regravelling costs. The use of poor materials results in accelerated gravel loss, and poor serviceability. The application of Innovative Initiatives in Road Design and Construction have been applied, which has resulted in the provision of water proof gravel roads and the provision of low volume surfaced roads as alternatives to the conventional poor gravel road. This paper compares various actual Waterproof Gravel and Low Volume Surfaced Road pavement design cases constructed, based on the Standard South African TRH 4(1) Pavement Design Manual, using the Standard South African TRH 14(2) Road Building Materials Standards, on roads carrying less than 400 vehicles per day. The paper indicates the benefits of using available insitu materials, mixed together with other economically available borrow materials, in combination with conventional and new stabilising agents and compaction aids. This together with conventional and new surfacing techniques, has resulted in the delivery of very cost-effective roads, to the rural communities inspite of the relatively low traffic, by applying appropriate engineering technology to match the project to the budget available. The paper suggests the use of Innovative Initiatives to match the public’s service delivery requests to the budget allocations given. Comparative cases of actual roads designed and constructed in KwaZulu-Natal are used to illustrate the benefit of applying innovative initiatives in road pavement technology to attempt to solve the provision of appropriate roads for rural communities on the African Continent, in all Developing Countries and possibly World wide.