The increase of pavement cost due to the traffic overloads

Publicado em "Bearing capacity of roads, railways and airfields: proceedings of the 10th International Conference on the Bearing Capacity of Roads, Railways and Airfields (BCRRA 2017)...". ISBN 978-1-138-29595-7The traffic on road pavements is characterized by a large number of different vehicle types, and these vehicles are considered in the pavement design by converting their effects through the use of truck fac-tors which transform the damage they apply to the pavement in the damage that would be applied by a stand-ard axle. However, there is an important number of vehicles that travel with axle loads above the maximum legal limit. These axles/vehicles cause significant damage to the pavements which increases the pavement construction and rehabilitation cost. This paper investigates the impact of overloaded vehicles using a weight database by studying the truck factors for different vehicle categories. The study concluded that the presence of overloaded vehicles increases pavement damage and life cycle costs compared to the cost of the same vehi-cles with legal loads.The first author would like to express the support of Portuguese national funding agency for science, research and technology (FCT) through scholarship SFRH/BSAB/114415/2016.