Asphalt Paving
The Illinois Tollway maintains and operates 294 miles of roadway on five tollways across 12 counties in Northern Illinois and serves more than 1.6 million vehicles each day.
The system serves three international airports, connects to the nation’s second-largest rail network, and strives to...
Growing up in Del Rio, Texas, Gustavo Villarreal did not dream of owning a construction business one day. He simply knew he wanted more from his future.
“I started as a migrant worker,” said Villarreal, who spent summers picking cucumbers and asparagus alongside his parents and siblings. At 18...
At 8:29 a.m. on Friday, Nov. 30, 2018, the earth started rocking and shaking in Anchorage, Alaska.
At the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities (DOT&PF) headquarters, ceiling tiles fell on desks, shelves and their contents spilled onto the floor, and families anxiously...
More often than not on a paving job, it’s not the paving itself that proves to be the most challenging aspect—it’s handling the traffic.
Live traffic in close proximity to an active work zone presents numerous challenges and dangers, not least of which is worker safety. But the placement of a...
It’s impossible to convince rain to come again another day. Sloan Construction tested this hypothesis more times than it needed to.
Dark storm clouds meant extra work for the contractor, at least at the start of the I-85 project in South Carolina. An 11.8-mile stretch of highway was in such bad...
When working on one of the largest pavement rehabilitation projects in the history of the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) on one of the busiest interstate highways in the U.S., any contractor is going to have their work cut out for them.
Such was the task that Granite...
Located on a 309-acre site, the 1.7-mile NCAT Pavement Test Track is a world-renowned accelerated pavement testing facility that combines full-scale pavement construction with live, heavy truck trafficking for rapid testing and analysis of asphalt pavements.
Since its original construction in...
The Blue Ridge Parkway revels in its new autumn shades of yellow, orange and red that follow the road’s meandering, peaceful curves. Quickly, the brisk fall weather turns to biting winter cold, and the skies shift from clear blues to darker greys. The landscape becomes stark, quiet and still as the...
Image: NCAT
Cargill is partnering with the National Center for Asphalt Technology (NCAT) in Opelika, Ala., and the Minnesota Department of Transportation’s (MnDOT) MnROAD program in Albertville, Minn., to determine how to best implement performance-engineered mix design procedures, especially in mixes...
The intersection at Margaret and Williams Street, which sees an ADT volume of 9,900 vehicles.
The village of Thornton, Ill., is about 25 miles south of downtown Chicago and 4 miles west of the Illinois/Indiana border, situated with access to the Illinois Tri-State Tollway, Illinois Rte. 1 (Halsted Street) and I-80.
The western portion of Thornton sits above 400-ft-deep sedimentary...
Scotty’s Contracting, out of Bowling Green, Ky., has a long familiarity with I-65.
They have been the prime contractors on a comprehensive expansion of 92 contiguous miles of the interstate in the state of Kentucky—work that dates back to the 1990s and is presently still ongoing near...
Image: NCDOT
As much of a headache as it may be for one contractor to finish a job started by another, it could be even trickier when the road widening project in question is out of phase and has an uneven intermediate surface course.
That is precisely what Lane Construction Corp. had to work with when they...
NCDOT wanted to expand U.S. Rte. 17-74-76 from four lanes to six lanes.
The North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) needs to feel like a kid at a vegetable stand.
Up until this year, the NCDOT gazed upon candy that was stacked high . . . 12-high to be exact. That is how many mixes the state agency could choose from for an asphalt paving project. Now it is...
Originally constructed in 1905 by the Territorial Legislative Assembly, and containing segments of the old Rte. 26 from Deming to Nutt and a stretch from Nutt to Hatch (which were originally Rte. 27), Rte. 26 in New Mexico was shown, in a map dated 1927, as a “first class” road between Deming and...
Traffic never stopped flowing during the Tower Road widening project.
Prolonged residential growth in the northeast portion of the Denver Metro area, along with expansion and continued development at Denver International Airport, has led to massive increased traffic and congestion along Tower Road, bringing movement through the corridor to a grinding halt during peak...
Situated only 15 miles outside the famous Las Vegas strip, the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area is comprised of 198,000 acres of protected, nationally significant geological and ecological resources.
Stretching through the conservation area is a 13-mile-long one-way picturesque roadway...
On Aug. 18, 2017, the editorial staff of Roads & Bridges magazine visited the $2.3 billion I-4 Ultimate project in Orlando, Fla. The 21-mile project site is presently at the midpoint of its construction, and the scale was enormous. We brought our 360 camera along for the trip. Here's another...
Unforeseen subgrade conditions, work-hour and construction-zone restrictions, heavy truck traffic and working in part of a floodplain—all these issues were encountered during the reconstruction of 30 miles of U.S. Rte. 85 (Ault to Wyoming) in northern Colorado.
Each of the issues had the...
Having a ticket for some dry cleanings can lead to a lot of watching and waiting. Nobody would blame anyone if they walked out.
Many paying spectators were exiting early during races at the Texas Motor Speedway due to wet conditions. No matter how hard crews worked to dry the track, it usually...
Construction projects in dense urban or suburban areas are among the most crucial to our national infrastructure, yet they also tend to be the least applauded.
There are no gorgeous vistas to consider in photographs, no access offered on completion to theretofore unreachable beauties. Mostly,...
