Are concrete pavements more expensive to build than asphalt?
The initial cost of asphalt pavement construction is usually less than concrete. But, in addition to construction cost, an increasingly important factor is the traffic delay cost incurred by the public during construction or rehabilitation. You can’t close down a busy road and spend weeks repairing it without costing businesses and individuals potentially millions of dollars. With asphalt, you can usually perform construction and rehabilitation operations at night or within a very narrow construction window. Some of our contractor members have done jobs where the public never even sees an lane closure or orange cone unless they’re there at night when the paving is going on. The contractors will go out and set up their traffic control and do the milling and the overlay, and everything is gone by 5 a.m. The average commuter goes to work the next day, drives on a whole new pavement, and has never even seen traffic cone.
