Micro-asphalt road treatment

[User33236]

Came home yesterday afternoon to find signs all along my road regarding no parking tomorrow as the road is being resurfaced. 'Great' I thought 'just hope it is not that cheap, nasty, cr@p stuff they will be using!'

Alas I found a leaflet on my doormat informing me that it is indeed this 'micro-asphalt' stuff they will be using and goes in at great length about how wonderful it is. Maybe for the council's pockets it is but I wonder how many of the road department employees actually enjoy riding over this stuff for the first x number of weeks?

My wife text me this morning to tell me that they are doing a section on her commute route today so that my usual 'quick spin' route badgered for a while too

 

[Cuchilo]

Very lucky in my neck of the woods as alot of roads have been re surfaced , Oddly though , outside my house they are digging up the pavement and parking area that is larger than the road and re doing that adding a cycle lane That bit was fine , the road and pavement that they are not touching is terrible !

 

[mjr]

It could be worse: they might have just done "surface dressing".

 

[Fab Foodie]

It could be worse: they might have just done "surface dressing".

... or like Oxfordshire, doing nothing at all. No wonder sales of 4x4's are rising here ....

 

[Fab Foodie]

Came home yesterday afternoon to find signs all along my road regarding no parking tomorrow as the road is being resurfaced. 'Great' I thought 'just hope it is not that cheap, nasty, cr@p stuff they will be using!'

Alas I found a leaflet on my doormat informing me that it is indeed this 'micro-asphalt' stuff they will be using and goes in at great length about how wonderful it is. Maybe for the council's pockets it is but I wonder how many of the road department employees actually enjoy riding over this stuff for the first x number of weeks?

My wife text me this morning to tell me that they are doing a section on her commute route today so that my usual 'quick spin' route badgered for a while too

It's God's way of telling you that you need a Gravel Bike!

 

[Levo-Lon]

Their damed if they do and damed if they dontl.
it really does help prevent pot holes as the road surface is sealed with tar.
yes its a pain...but constant road repairs are worse, mind you they re coated our foot path last year then dug it up to fit new lamp posts..the day after lol

 

[mjr]

... or like Oxfordshire, doing nothing at all. No wonder sales of 4x4's are rising here ....

I prefer nothing to surface dressing, as at least then you can see the holes and don't have an inch of loose gravel to skid on!

(and that tyre is 40mm!)

 

[Fab Foodie]

I prefer nothing to surface dressing, as at least then you can see the holes and don't have an inch of loose gravel to skid on!

(and that tyre is 40mm!)

 

[Hugh Manatee]

Year ago we rode through a section of surface dressing and by the end of it six sets of Record Delta brake calipers had the bottom plates worn through. Now that was an expensive ride. I was a poor student at the time so it wasn't me, but still....I learned some new words that day.

 

[User33236]

There's a road me that isn't quite wide enough to be two lanes each side but wide enough that drivers sit either near the kerb if they are driving within the speed limit or out towards the white line as overtake options are frequent. As a result it bedded if very unevenly and a year on is worse than the surface it replaced.

 

[User33236]

Their damed if they do and damed if they dontl.
it really does help prevent pot holes as the road surface is sealed with tar.
yes its a pain...but constant road repairs are worse, mind you they re coated our foot path last year then dug it up to fit new lamp posts..the day after lol

When I lived in Greenock the council relaid about a mile of road and footpath that passed in front of our house only for NTL to dig it up along its entire length two days later!

 

[Globalti]

Highways engineers are obsessed with skid resistance, which is why they love top-dressing so much. There's a section of road between Helmshore and the Haslingden Grane Road that was done wrong and the emulsion didn't dry properly, meaning that within a few weeks all the granite chips had been blasted off to the sides and bare patches were appearing; my car ended up covered in tiny tar spots from dried emulsion, which took a few hours of work with a rag soaked in paraffin to remove.

I think micro-asphalt is a finer, better version of top-dressing.

 

[mjr]

Highways engineers are obsessed with skid resistance, which is why they love top-dressing so much. There's a section of road between Helmshore and the Haslingden Grane Road that was done wrong and the emulsion didn't dry properly, meaning that within a few weeks all the granite chips had been blasted off to the sides and bare patches were appearing;

It might help skid resistance if it was ever done right, but it seems very rarely done correctly now. Dump-and-run seems far more common, so even if the emulsion does dry properly, there's still a deep layer of loose chippings left around for weeks or months - or a year like in my report linked from the photo above - which quickly removes chippings that did stick in the most-heavily-used wheel tracks. That might happen more than engineers expect because no-one seems to follow their maximum speed advice.

So after a couple of weeks, we're left with bare emulsion along the wheel tracks that seems far slippier than the previous surface, but you can't safely move off the motorists' line because any potholes there are now concealed by loose chippings gathering in them.

 

[User33236]

Reading the blurb that came through the door it goes on about stone loss and chipping so doesn't a whole lot different.

 

[mjr]

Reading the blurb that came through the door it goes on about stone loss and chipping so doesn't a whole lot different.

The black stuff in this Street View is what I know as "micro asphalt" (they didn't have any red so didn't resurface that obsolete cycle lane!) and it's a much finer looks-sprayed-on surface than the tar-and-dump stuff I know as "surface dressing". There was some stone loss, but I think it was much smaller and rounder (almost a thick dust) and stopped within a few days.