Maintenance Strategies For The Highway In Tanzania

Abstract

Road Infrastructure is an asset that contributes significant to the economic growth of the nation and reduction in poverty. However, like many other assets, roads do deteriorate with time and thus need to be maintained. Roads deteriorate due to the effect of environment and traffic loading.

Road maintenance requires a huge amount of resources and thus imposes a major challenge to many low income developing countries where there is always a competing demand for very limited resources available. An economic evaluation of different road investment strategies becomes therefore necessary in order to have scientific criteria for the most economic utilization of the little resources available.

In this research, a section of the TANZAM Highway in Tanzania (Igawa – Mbeya Section 115 Km) was selected for case study. Relevant information about road maintenance in Tanzania was gathered. A road condition survey was done on the case road to identify the existing typical pavement defects and their probable causes. The HDM-4 model was used to predict the life cycle pavement deterioration and to investigate the optimum maintenance strategies from an economic point of view.

The study revealed that road maintenance financing is one of the biggest challenge facing the government. The visual road condition survey revealed that many of the typical defects observed were probably caused by poor construction quality and vehicles overloading. The section Igawa – Chimala was observed to be in comparative poor condition. Reasonable lifecycle pavement deterioration patterns were obtained by the use of HDM-4 model. However the model has not yet calibrated and adapted for the local conditions thus the output results must be treated with great care.