In the new feature 4 Questions With..., we shine a spotlight on various Resilient Roadways members, asking them four questions around the theme of resilience. This edition of “4 Questions” features a Q&A with Dr. Benjamin F. Bowers, PE a professor of pavements and materials at Auburn University and a member of the National Center for Asphalt Technology (NCAT).

What is the relative importance of road resilience at your agency or organization?

At Auburn University and the National Center for Asphalt Technology, we consider it our mission and responsibility to serve our community—be it agencies, industry, or users—in making a more sustainable and long-lasting pavement system. Making our roadway network resilient to disruptions is critical since the impacts are felt both economically and societally.

Our research efforts have evaluated pavement resilience to things such as traffic loads and their impact over time (see the NCAT Pavement Test Track) and development of experimental matrices to develop, evaluate and deploy technologies that will make our systems last longer under growing stresses. We also consider environmental conditions in our core design methods (for example, see Performance Graded asphalt binders). Our research program will only continue to grow as we investigate and identify solutions to climate-related disruptions such as flood inundation, among others.

What are the biggest hurdles to overcome in developing more resilient transportation (road) infrastructure?

The biggest hurdles to overcome are threefold in my opinion. First, we as a transportation community—namely a pavements community—need to understand what resilience is and how it relates to the system and context that we work within. To get on the same page is progress. That is why I like to refer to the Federal Highway Administration’s definition from FHWA Order 5520, “Resilience or resiliency is the ability to anticipate, prepare for, and adapt to changing conditions and withstand, respond to, and recover rapidly from disruptions.”

Second, we need to fundamentally understand why our pavements are failing under certain circumstances. We have theories and anecdotal evidence, but when we developed our design procedures we didn’t intentionally put a road underwater, subject it to a forest fire, or place a load well beyond the legal limit (as a result of disaster cleanup) to see what would happen.

Third, we already have tools in our toolbox that we can use today; we don’t have to completely revolutionize our design methodology, we simply need to understand what tools can be used for what situations. Most of our tools – polymers, rubber, geo-grids and fabrics, porous pavement systems, full depth reclamation – have not traditionally been applied in the resilience context, but they’re things we do every day for other reasons. We can use these tools to varying degrees to build resilience into our pavements and networks.

What type of data needs to be gathered to understand and provide more resilient roads?

We need to gather data on what types of failures are happening now, including forensic investigations into pavement failures. I think we often rush out to fix the problem without actually understanding what took place. Understanding the cause of the failure and the failure mechanism together will help us design a more resilient solution. I also think we need to collect data on these different “tools” in situations where disruptions occur so that we can better understand their positive impact. This can be done in controlled environments (like the NCAT Pavement Test Track) or in the field.

As an industry, how might we influence policy makers and politicians to fund ‘designing and building for resilient roads’? 

As an academic entity we provide data and data interpretation to all entities to help inform policy.