No Parking - a driver in East Africa had a notion to leave his car rather too close to his house - image courtesy of World Highways reader Francis Gicheru
January 21, 2014
Read time: 1 min
No Parking - a driver in East Africa had a notion to leave his car rather too close to his house - image courtesy of World Highways reader Francis Gicheru
All around the world, vehicle numbers are growing fast and existing roads are seeing increasing congestion. This rapid increase in vehicle ownership is particularly acute in the developing world. Reductions in actual vehicle purchase costs have resulted in an explosion in vehicle numbers using the roads.
In the past, governments were able to fund road expansion programmes from their own sources. The most ambitious of these came when the US Government commenced construction of the Interstate system in 1956,
Machine manufacturers and construction companies around the globe are currently searching for ways to achieve the goal of climate-neutral construction. The challenge here is to successively reduce emissions of CO2 and other harmful gases (summarized to CO2 equivalents: CO2e) around the world to zero over the coming decades. In the road construction sector, this transformation is inextricably linked to the improvement and further development of production and working processes. In the future, machines and construction materials will also be assessed based on the climate-harmful emissions arising from their production and use. However, the focus should not be on individual machines, but on the entire process leading up to the finished product – a road. Ultimately, the decisive factor is the emissions generated per kilometer of newly built or rehabilitated road – the “CO2e per work done”.
Work is now underway on a major road improvement project in central Nepal. The Chinese contractor, China Construction Seventh Engineering Division (CSSED), is carrying out the upgrade of the East-West Highway route linking Narayagadh and Butwal. The 131km road improvement project is worth US$142.9 million and is expected to be ready by the end of 2022. The project will boost capacity and safety for drivers on the route by widening the road so that it has two lanes in either direction, rather than just one l
