Sustainable Concrete Pavement Design Solutions Applied on the Largest PPP Motorway Construction Project in Europe

The authors present the sustainable pavement design solutions applied on 106 km long section of A2 toll motorway in Poland. For this largest infrastructure project, realized in the frame of Public-Private Partnerships (PPP), the concession model, where the concessionaire has to be paid by public part for the accessibility of the pavement during concession period of 30 years, was applied. The maximum pavement availability to traffic and so minimum maintenance actions were required by Public part. The pavement had to be designed so that after this period all traffic lanes will be handed over to public partner still at the highest technical conditions, class A, specified by Polish Law. Thus the pavement of the concession motorway had to be designed practically for more than 30 years. All the maintenance actions had to be predicted at the design stage, in order to minimize concessioner risk, paid for availability. This led finally to the decision to choose the rigid pavement with exposed aggregate concrete, applied for the first time in Poland on this Project. The two-layers jointed plain concrete slabs with dowels and tie bars were applied. Two existing sub-sections were constructed once with continuously reinforced concrete and once with doweled slabs.