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Development of Asphalt

Although most people may not understand how roads are built, I believe we all know that the materials used for road construction today are basically asphalt.

That's why asphalt is an excellent material for road construction. In 1838, the world's first road paved with asphalt appeared in Hamburg, Prussia, and it began to sweep across the world.

Japan is no exception. In 1950, the Japan Road Association introduced the road laying standards of the British Asphalt Research Association, and based on the specific national conditions of Japan, the "Asphalt Paving Planning Outline" was formulated.

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Road construction materials in China and Japan

Since then, the Japanese have been building roads in accordance with this outline. Today, the number of roads built in Japan has reached more than 400,000 kilometers, and the proportion of asphalt roads is as high as 98.9% and nearly 100%.

In contrast, at the beginning of the founding of the People's Republic of China, China could not afford such an expensive material as asphalt. Therefore, in the 1950s, the materials used to build roads in China were all mixed materials of sand, gravel and clay.

After entering the 1980s, China's economy has grown rapidly, and China's road asphalt material industry has also developed rapidly. The price of asphalt is finally no longer a factor that we must consider when building roads.

So we re-applied asphalt to the construction of urban roads and highway trunk lines. So here comes the problem. If we say that in the 1950s and 1960s, a small part of the roads built in China were of poor quality, so it is understandable that they were often repaired.

But in the 1980s, we also used asphalt to build roads, why can't we avoid the situation of repairing every year?

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Why China's Asphalt Roads Are Repaired Every Year

First, China and Japan have different ways of building roads. When the Japanese build roads, they will first divide the whole road into a unit of 100 square meters, and the materials on the road are also laid in layers.

After the laying is completed, the construction personnel will also carry out strict quality inspection on it. If it is qualified, the construction work of the next section will be carried out.

In this way, the quality of the roads can naturally be guaranteed, and because China has a large population and a vast territory, if the Japanese way of doing things is followed, the entire country will naturally fail to achieve the goal of rapid development.

Therefore, the concept of China's road construction has always been "build first and then repair", that is, after meeting most of people's needs, then revise the problems that arise.

Of course, no matter how well-built Japanese roads are, problems will arise, and the way the Japanese build roads is obviously different from ours.

In this case, the government personnel will mark the damaged road section first, and then the municipal road section personnel will work at night for maintenance. This will cause people to produce a kind of Japanese road quality that is too high, so it is as new all the year round. illusion.

In contrast, as long as China's roads are damaged, construction workers will rush to repair them as soon as possible. In this way, we can often see the scene of workers repairing roads on the road, which will naturally cause problems with Chinese roads. The feeling of stopping in repair.

Another point is that China is in a stage of rapid development, and the infrastructure of many cities is being upgraded. For example, the wires on the original utility poles or the gas pipelines are laid below the road surface.

This requires the road to be dug up and then repaired, but the problem is that these works are not carried out at the same time, which creates the illusion that the road often has problems.