High-quality, safe, and accessible paved thoroughfares are essential if a city is to grow and prosper. Whether a town is expanding by building new homes or attracting new businesses, the municipality’s streets and roads provide access to shopping, schools, entertainment, jobs, and education for the town’s residents and commuters and visitors. Due to the low cost and speed of installation, asphalt road construction makes it easier and more cost-effective for cities trying to keep pace with growth. However, without adequate maintenance, the pavements can become unusable long before reaching their expected life, forcing the city to rebuild them and waste taxpayer funds.
Why Street and Road Maintenance Is Important in Austin, Texas
What Happens to Asphalt Pavements When Municipalities Ignore Road and Street Maintenance?
When asphalt pavements are new, they are quite resilient. They can easily support the number and type of vehicles they were designed to bear, bounce back from seasonal thermal cycles, and even withstand a bit of abuse. If the installation was top-notch, a city street might not need more than an isolated crack repair or two during its first few years of life. However, ignoring those small cracks can set off a chain of damage that will lead to costly repairs or early pavement replacement. Small cracks will continue to expand, growing deeper, longer, and wider. Rain leaks through the cracks, inflicting damage to the base layers. The base suffers water erosion and weakens, allowing depressions to form on the surface of the pavement. Potholes develop, alligator cracking occurs, more water enters, and the damage grows progressively worse and more widespread. In a relatively short time, the city must engage a paving company to tear out the existing pavement, rebuild the base, and reinstall the pavement. Although the process for rebuilding an asphalt pavement will be faster than it would be for a concrete pavement, the reconstruction will still impact traffic. Traffic jams can be inconvenient and frustrating for drivers, but detouring traffic through residential neighborhoods with streets that were never intended to bear the volume or weight can significantly damage the side streets. The chain of failed pavements can quickly exhaust the city’s pavement budget for the next several years, requiring civic leaders to choose between ignoring the damaged infrastructure or seeking ways to increase funding through tax increases or budget reallocations.
What Type of Maintenance Procedures Do Asphalt Paving Companies in Texas Recommend for Municipal Streets?
The city should have a reputable paving company assess its streets every six months, once in the spring and again in the autumn. The contractor should repair every significant crack that he discovers during his assessment. Crack repairs are economical and will not substantially disrupt traffic. Should potholes develop, it is essential to repair them as quickly as possible to prevent them from expanding or causing more damage to the base. The city should budget for a pavement overlay on heavily trafficked thoroughfares about every 10 years; streets with light traffic may only need an overlay every 12 to 15 years. A pavement overlay basically functions as a reconstruction, but installing an overlay is much faster and a great deal cheaper.
Trust Your Pavement Maintenance to the Industry Leader
Alpha Paving is one of the most respected asphalt paving companies in Texas. Our headquarters are in Round Rock, but we serve clients in many Central Texas locations. Our services include road construction, street maintenance, asphalt overlays and paving, sealcoating, concrete work, thermoplastic markings and striping, asphalt milling, asphalt crack, and pothole repairs, speed bump installation, parking lot striping, and traffic signs. Our customers include numerous municipalities and counties, schools, airports, hotels and resorts, dining establishments, health care facilities, office parks, entertainment, and recreational venues, apartment complexes, religious institutions, industrial facilities, homeowner associations, and shopping centers. We earned our exemplary reputation by delivering on-time work of the highest quality, providing exceptional service, and maintaining the highest standards for professionalism, ethics, and transparency. We do not attach any strings to our free quotes, so request yours today by submitting our online form. If you would rather call, you can reach us at 512-677-9001.