Better roads save fuel
- robball6
- 6 days ago
- 2 min read
A study on a 35km section of the M50 motorway around Madrid, showed that fuel consumption after road resurfacing was 10% lower than consumption beforehand for an average car. For the M50, with 115,000 vehicles per day using it, that added up to carbon emission savings of 31.3 tonnes a year – as well as fuel cost savings for drivers.
The result of the study, carried out by Spanish road operator SEITT and the University of Valencia, were presented at an event held by the European Road Maintenance Forum (ERMF) to mark International Road Maintenance Day on 3 April. One of the themes to emerge from the event is that road owners and maintenance contractors need to better communicate the benefits of well-maintained roads to the public.
Juan Jose Potti, the president of Spanish asphalt producers’ association ASEFMA, said that rather than talking about road rehabilitation and maintenance projects, the industry should frame them as projects to reduce emissions and lower fuel bills for road users. Signage about projects should not talk about money invested in a scheme but about carbon and fuel saved, he suggested.
Denmark has been investigating how roads with low rolling resistance can save fuel, and hence lower carbon emissions for over 15 years, and has carried out multiple surfacing trials aimed to find the right asphalt mix. Back in 2019, the Danish roads authority calculated that reducing rolling resistance by 4% on Netherland’s roads would lead to annual fuel savings of 60 million litres and 140,000 tonnes of carbon.
Better road surfaces would reduce fuel consumption on local roads too, although savings reduce with the speed of travel. For slower roads, the percentage fuel savings would be lower than for motorways, perhaps 4 to 6%, according to Christophe Nicodème, director of the European Road Federation (ERF), who also spoke at the event.
Nicodème used the event to reinforce the message that preventative message delivers long-term cost saving. “With the lack of maintenance, the cost to repair 1km of road increases,” he said. “Every year it requires more money to repair it.” Timely interventions at shorter intervals increase pavement life and reduce whole life cost, he explained.
Getting the message across
Just as in the UK, perhaps the biggest challenge facing the road maintenance industry in the European Union is how to persuade politicians that investing in roads boosts economies. And there’s the problem of public perception of roadworks: how do we persuade them that roadworks are a vital value-adding intervention, rather than an annoying inconvenience which should not be happening?
With so many highways networks in such a poor state of repair around Europe, however, such conversations become even more difficult. This was a point made by Malcolm Simms of the Mineral Products Association who presented the findings of the UK’s Annual Local Authority Road Maintenance (ALARM) survey to the event.
“It’s hard to sell the positives when the user only sees negatives,” Simms said. “Their expectation is 24-7, 365-day immediate service all the time. It’s a real challenge to communicate those benefits when today the users are not seeing them.”
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