Impact of Heavy Vehicles on European Roads

Key note lecture for the BCRRA 2005 conference

Abstract

More then 500 billion € is spent yearly in the European Union on mobility. The road traffic is increasing at a rate of four to five percent each year, leading to an expected growth from mow to the year 2020 of fifty to sixty percent. The road network is extremely important to Europe’s economic and it requires efficient management using state of the art technology. The traffic volume of heavy vehicles using the road network has been increasing steadily over the last decades, as is the trend for increasing individual axle loads. The weighing of road vehicle axles in motion (WIM) is getting more and more an important factor for the record and analysis of the traffic stream. One chapter of this paper describes new applications of a special method SIM (stress in motion) for the measurement of force distributions under rolling wheels.