Roads & Bridges – February 2011
State Rte. 700 in western Palm Beach County, Fla., takes a lot of abuse. The two-lane rural highway is in an agricultural area, so almost all of its traffic is heavy trucks, especially during the harvest, from October to April.
As a result of the punishing truck traffic—about 3,000 vehicles a day, at least 85% trucks—and the fact that the soil under the road is soft and prone to settling, S.R. 700 historically has needed to be resurfaced every seven years.
For the latest resurfacing, the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) threw the project open to life-cycle cost analysis and tossed in the option of hot in-place recycling (HIR). What rose to the top was HIR, so the state set out to perform its first HIR project. The general contractor on the project was Ranger Construction Industries Inc. The paving subcontractor was Hot in Place Paving LLC (HIP). The designer was the Corridino Group. The total project cost was $10.6 million.