Measuring Rolling Resistance of Typical Swedish Pavements

Rolling resistance properties of a large number of Swedish pavements and a few Danish pavements have been measured in recent years by means of a special trailer produced and owned by the Technical University of Gdansk in Poland. Three different automobile and light truck tires have been used as reference tires, two of them representing automobile tires and one representing truck tires (with regard to pavement properties). There are several problems related to the measurement methods, which are briefly dealt with in this paper. The main part of the paper reports the rolling resistance coefficients (RRCs) that have been measured over a range of pavements common in Sweden and over a range of conditions. It appears that there is a very good and repeatable correlation between RRC and mean profile depth (MPD) of the pavement macrotexture, explaining approximately 80 % of the total variation. The variation in RRC between the worst and the best pavement is 45 %, which would correspond to approximately 5 % of fuel consumption and CO2 variation in highway driving. Looking at the most common pavements in Sweden, the range is approximately 20 %–25 % between the best and the worst. The conclusion is that there is a potential for reducing fuel consumption of road traffic by using pavements with low rolling resistance properties.