Monday, Aug 24, 2009 at 16:58
We have a great number of govt vehicles that travel down corrugated roads.
The private citizen caught doing this on a public road likely would get charged with creating a traffic
hazard despite the fact they are doing a public service!.
Also your fuel economy is going to suffer towing that resistance.
So - if the device was left along side the road - why couldn't the various govt vehicles (where its all of us paying for the extra fuel) simply hook on and tow it the length of the track, unhook at the end and it's the next govt employee guys turn to tow it back the other way?
Having actually built (and paid for) some roads in the past including bitumen ones, I can see a downside to the towing of
tyres, compared to grading the road.
That is, that the accumulated gravel material, can flow around the outside of the towed device - and where it comes close to the edge of the road, the surplus material is thrown clear of the road verge where a road grader cannot pick it up and move it back onto the road syrface.
When you paid millions of $ to win cart and spread that gravel onto the road - you can't afford to have it thrown clear of the road surface, off into the bush where it can't be recovered for use grading and filling the road in future.
Even contract grading quickly destroys a road base surface - because the canny contractor - will grade the road with less passes of the grader - by pushing surplus material off the road and into the bush. Less passes with the grader equals less time and fuel - more profit to the contractor grader.
For this reason shires should own their own grader and employ their own grader driver. In the end it is cheaper because they can conserve their own purchased road base material.
A GOOD grader driver (who's not an independent contractor) can grade the verge first to win back road base thats been pushed off the road buy vehicular traffic & water wash from rain etc.
When that material is won back it is then graded to the center and the road re crowned and graded with it's original road base. This process can go on again and again, with minimal loss of road base material.
A contractor on the other hand can grade, deep from the middle of the road to the outer edge pushing the excess material off to the sides into the bush past the verge where it can't be recovered with less passes of the grader and less fuel & time - hence more profit.
Contract graders can seemingly cost less to maintain the road than your own grader and operator except when it comes time to BUY more road base to replace whats been pushed off into the bush and lost.
As always - there's a right and a wrong way to do the job and the wrong way is the fast easy cheap way.
Cheers
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