Brand-new guardrails, lush flowers and trees, and wide, flat roads—driving on Zhejiang Provincial Highway 328 Li(shui)-Pu(cheng) Line is a beautiful experience. In Zhejiang, highway maintenance is no longer just traditional sweeping, pothole patching, and greening; instead, it endows every detail with more innovation and environmental protection concepts, achieving sustainable development while ensuring the safety and smoothness of the road network.

In recent years, Zhejiang has explored the transformation from passive maintenance focusing on poor roads to preventive maintenance prioritizing good roads, from traditional maintenance focusing on improving road condition indicators to modern maintenance focusing on improving driving comfort, and from high-energy-consumption maintenance to green, low-carbon maintenance with recycling. It strives to promote the coordinated development of road condition quality improvement and road environment beautification, enhance highway safety and comprehensive service levels, and, guided by building a modern maintenance management system, make every effort to build a smoother, safer, smarter, and greener highway network.

Preventive Maintenance

Extending Highway Service Life

“Preventive maintenance is cost-effective and can extend the service life of highways,” said a representative attending the Zhejiang Provincial Highway Pavement Preventive Maintenance On-site Meeting at the Tiantai Guanling to Xiangtang section of National Highway 104.

It is reported that this year, the Tiantai County Highway Administration first adopted ultra-thin wearing course overlay technology for preventive maintenance on 13 kilometers of asphalt pavement, effectively improving highway quality and rapid traffic capacity.

Zhejiang has rainy springs and autumns and high summer temperatures. Continuous rainfall reduces the performance of asphalt pavements. However, in recent years, highway collapses, landslides, and other water damage caused by heavy rain have been greatly reduced, mainly thanks to preventive maintenance of pavements by highway management departments.

“Preventive maintenance stems from the innovation in our province's highway maintenance awareness. Implementing ‘maintain good roads first’ is an important means to extend the service life of highway pavements and an effective way to stabilize and improve road conditions at low cost and high efficiency,” said a responsible person from the Zhejiang Provincial Highway Administration.

In recent years, Zhejiang Province has continuously innovated maintenance concepts and implemented a highway preventive maintenance management system across the province. In 2014, Zhejiang issued the “Notice on Strengthening the Management of Asphalt Pavement Preventive Maintenance Projects for Ordinary National and Provincial Trunk Highways,” extending preventive maintenance from expressways to ordinary national and provincial trunk highways.

“Preventive maintenance can greatly improve the waterproof, anti-skid, and anti-cracking performance of asphalt pavements and promptly and effectively enhance road conditions,” said a responsible person from the Zhejiang Provincial Highway Administration. Preventive maintenance plays an important and positive role in improving overall road quality, enhancing highway service capacity, and ensuring safe and convenient travel for the public.

With preventive maintenance as an important means, Zhejiang has formed a virtuous cycle in the management and maintenance of national and provincial trunk highways.

The reporter learned that by the end of the “13th Five-Year Plan” period, the average annual implementation mileage proportion of preventive maintenance (single-lane mileage) for expressways in Zhejiang Province will be no less than 12%, and no less than 10% for ordinary national and provincial trunk highways. The proportion of ordinary national and provincial trunk highways where poor roads identified in the current year receive maintenance the following year will reach 100%.

Technology-Based

Building a Green Maintenance System

The widespread use of energy-saving LED lighting on pavements and eye-friendly green belts that reduce dust and noise... Zhejiang Province has taken a series of measures in highway maintenance, vigorously promoting the application of “four new technologies” (new technologies, materials, methods, and processes), committed to building an energy-saving, low-carbon, and efficient green maintenance system, and achieving harmony with resources and the environment.

Haining City introduced advanced on-site hot recycling equipment, the “Era Recycling Train,” several years ago, implementing 450,000 square meters of on-site hot recycled asphalt pavement. All old pavement materials were 100% recycled, saving 35% of project costs and shortening the construction period by more than 50%.

In 2016, Zhejiang's first low-freezing-point filler asphalt concrete test pavement was laid in Huzhou. It is understood that the low-freezing-point filler used in the test belongs to salt-storage pavement technology, which replaces mineral powder with powdered chloride and uses new technology to slowly release chloride ions for long-term stable effects.

“This technology can prevent ice from forming on the pavement after snow, reducing traffic accidents and secondary pavement disasters in ice and snow weather,” said a responsible person from the Zhejiang Provincial Highway Administration. In Lishui, major and medium maintenance projects use new technologies such as on-site cold recycling of cement base, foamed asphalt recycling, and on-site recycling of crushed cement pavement according to local conditions, utilizing 300,000 tons (140,000 cubic meters) of old pavement materials, which could pile nearly 20 meters high on a standard football field.

In addition, crushed stone “white-to-black” (concrete to asphalt) technology is also a highlight of highway maintenance in Zhejiang. Multi-hammer crushing technology, because it does not require an additional cement-stabilized base, basically solves reflective cracks, speeds up construction progress, and has advantages such as saving resources, reducing pollution, and lowering energy consumption, and is widely used in “white-to-black” projects. The reporter learned that Zhejiang has also adopted “resonant crushing technology” in projects such as the Taizhou Linhai section of National Highway 104. This technology can better increase the strength of the crushed layer and completely solve reflective cracks, representing the direction for promoting “white-to-black” technology.

“In recent years, Zhejiang Province has promoted and applied a batch of new technologies in highway maintenance, such as foamed asphalt plant-mixed and road-mixed recycling, plant-mixed hot recycling, and water-stabilized on-site cold recycling. Through measures such as the ‘Five-Year Plan,’ annual target assessment, major and medium maintenance plans, project review and approval, and design technical guidelines, it guides the recycling of pavement materials,” a responsible person from the Zhejiang Provincial Highway Administration told the reporter.

In the next stage, Zhejiang highway management departments will continue to adhere to the Ministry of Transport's “13th Five-Year Plan” highway maintenance development policy of “reform攻坚, maintenance transformation, management upgrade, and service quality improvement,” implement the decision and deployment of the Zhejiang Provincial Party Committee and Provincial Government to build the “Ten-Thousand-Mile Beautiful Economic Transportation Corridor,” and actively promote the recycling of waste pavement materials and carry out green maintenance in accordance with the requirements of resource conservation and ecological environmental protection. At the same time, guided by technological innovation, vigorously promote the application of “four new technologies”: new maintenance equipment, materials, methods, and processes. By the end of the “13th Five-Year Plan” period, Zhejiang Province will achieve 100% coverage of technical condition detection and automated pavement collection, 100% popularization of scientific decision-making technology, 98% recovery rate of waste pavement materials for ordinary national and provincial trunk highways, and a recycling utilization rate of over 90%, comprehensively forming a modern maintenance management system.