Development of a Removable Urban Pavement Technology

A Removable Urban Pavement (RUP) is a pavement that can be open and closed rapidly, with light facility, for an easy access to underground networks. It has the same difference with a conventional road as a window compared to a solid wall. No such a pavement seems to have ever been constructed, although the premises of the concept can be found in some military paths or industrial soils. A survey towards French city authorities shown the potential interest of the RUP concept in decreasing the public annoyance caused by pavement and network maintenance works. Two cities, St Aubin-lès-Elbeuf (Seine-Maritime) and Nantes (Loire-Atlantique) accepted to host an experience of RUP, by providing a series of specifications applying to streets to be built in new residential areas. Then, original pavement designs were proposed, based upon precast, hexagonal concrete slabs over an hydraulic base course that could be easily excavated. Such a structure was successfully evaluated on a carrousel-type fatigue machine. Call for tenders were recently published, in order to find contractors that could experiment the technique at the scale of a 100-m long street.