Bridge Traffic Loading: The Implications of Some Recent Findings

The maintenance of highway infrastructure requires major expenditure in many countries. By minimizing the repair or replacement of highway bridges in particular, this cost can be reduced significantly. Of the two bridge assessment components, loading is more difficult to estimate than strength, due to its more variable nature. Consequently, bridge traffic loading has been an area of intensive research in recent years. Recent research has focused on assumptions inherent in previous work and the results are presented and discussed. In this paper, the latest statistical analyses adapted for use in the bridge traffic loading problem are reported. Comparisons to the previous state of the art are made and it is shown that a revised approach reflects the underlying phenomenon of bridge traffic loading more accurately. A method which is shown to reduce the variability of the statistical extrapolation process is also presented. Of more significance, a statistical approach which joins the dynamic and static effects of traffic loading is presented. An assumption inherent in much previous research in this area is that free-flowing traffic with coincident dynamic effects is more critical than congested traffic (which has practically no dynamic effect) for short- t