In the beginning of the 20th century, many European cities had a tramway, but those disappeared around the 1950’s when the car became the modern mode of transportation and metro lines were built in the big cities. However, tramways made their come-back in the 1990’s when cities started rethinking their mobility concept and spatial planning. Together with bus transport, cycling and walking, they are today the dominant transport modes in urban areas. Both trams and buses require a high quality and, if possible, dedicated infrastructure, for which concrete offers safe and reliable long life solutions.
Concrete pavements that support the transportation infrastructure offer:
HIGH QUALITY BUS CONNECTIONS:
• Reliability: durable pavement which needs little or no maintenance over its lifetime
• Economics: Concrete pavement can have a long service life requiring minimum maintenance. Higher investment costs are therefore easily compensated for during the operational phase, particularly when financial penalties are foreseen for non-availability of the system.
• Safety: The skid resistance and transverse evenness of a road surface are very important as far as safety is concerned. A well-designed concrete pavement maintains very good skid resistance from day one for [3 to 4] decades. Rutting does not occur with concrete bus lanes.
• Comfort: The most relevant factor for a comfortable pavement is the longitudinal evenness. If properly built, a concrete pavement will have a smooth surface that remains smooth throughout the entire surface life.
• Aesthetics: It is often desirable, particularly in an urban environment, to integrate the pavement in aesthetic terms into the cityscape. Colored or patterned surfaces offer considerable possibilities.
LIGHT-RAIL AND TRAMWAYS: Urban public transport often combines buses and trams and infrastructure can be shared by both systems. Different technical solutions exist to combine the rails with the concrete structure:
– Embedment of the rail in a groove in the concrete slab
– Discrete xation of the rail on the slab
– Use of prefabricated elements (beams, slabs) with integrated rails
– Embedding precast concrete sleepers in the structure by pouring concrete around them
To download the PDF of the leaflet, please click on image above right, or go to: https://www.eupave.eu/wp-content/uploads/EUPAVE-Leaflet-Sustainable-Urban-Transport-Infrastructure-version-May-2018.pdf