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The world’s leading highway associations have launched International Road Maintenance Day to focus people everywhere on the protection of their local road networks. International Road Maintenance Day will take place on the first Thursday of every April, speakers said on day two of the Pavement Preservation and Recycling Summit (PPRS Nice 2018). The first event will take place on April 5, 2018. “It will be one day per year to talk about the maintenance of our roads,” said Juan Jose Potti, the president of

Highway organisations around the world will need ever-more sophisticated frameworks to ensure their asset management is up-to-date and fit-for-purpose. Jacques Tavernier, chairman of PPRS Nice 2018, and Claude van Rooten, president of PIARC, the World Road Association emphasised the point at at this week’s Pavement Preservations and Recycling Summit. A nation’s roads are its first and most important “main asset … essential for a country’s economic, social and environmental development”, said van Roote

More than 9% of major highway bridges in the US are “rated structurally deficient” and in need of “urgent attention”, according to Bud Wright, chief executive of AASHTO, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. Action is needed now. In a recent infrastructure report, AASHTO reported that the US has just over 614,000 road bridges, 25% of which are 50 or more years older. Also, around 56,000 - 9.1% - of them are now structurally deficient. This is a shocking and growing

You learn from your failures, not your successes. That was the overall message for delegates during the day-two morning session on the impact of engineering structural failures. These lessons are also too often “painful”, said Anne-Marie Leclerq, deputy minister for infrastructure within the ministry of transport for the Canadian province of Quebec. On September 30, 2006, a span of the six-lane Concorde Bridge in Laval, near Montreal, collapsed crushing to death five people and injuring six. Only recently

Volvo CE says that it will utilise 3D parts printing technology to supply customers. The firm says that this will allow it to supply quality components quickly and at lower cost to customers. By using 3D parts printing the firm also says it will be able to carry out prototype testing of components more speedily than in the past. “We are supporting customers through the life cycle of their equipment,” said Jasenko Lagumdzija, anager of Business Support at Volvo CE. “It’s especially good for older machines

A new highway project is being planned for India’s Uttar Pradesh State. The US$522.7 million project will see a 100km section of the Hapur Bypass being widened, so that it will feature three lanes in either direction. This section of the route is from Moradabad to Hapur and the work will be carried out by IRB Infrastructure Developers. The contract was awarded by the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) under the build, operate and transfer model.

A new bridge project will improve transport connections between China and Myanmar. The bridge will be located in Myanmar’s Shan area, bordering with China’s Yunnan Province. This will replace the existing bridge at Kunlong. The new bridge will measure 4.2km in length, spanning the Thanlwin River. This will form part of the route running through Theinni, Kunlong and Chinshwehaw and the project includes building 4km of connecting roads.

Bidding is strong for a project to build the new Karavanke tunnel in Slovenia, with the award due soon and construction expected to commence in 2018. So far nine bids have been received for the link, which lies close to Slovenia’s border with Austria. A bid of €89.3 million has been made by the Turkish contractor Cengiz Insaat, while at the other end of the scale a bid of €140 million has come from a partnership of Slovenian firm Pomgrad and Swiss company Marti. A partnership comprising Implenia Österreich