Work hard, pave hard: The importance of Road Maintenance
Interview with Lachlan McLean
Lachlan McLean is Pavement Management Services’ Chief Estimator and Project Manager. Originally from a Marketing and Economics background, Lachlan has worked tirelessly to learn all there is to learn about the world of civil engineering and the nuanced world of pavement engineering and design.
Over the past four years, Lachlan has heard the pleas of hundreds of engineers, road operators and asset managers and has worked together with them to build compelling solutions for one of civil engineering’s most unavoidable truths – the inevitable demise of our once shiny, brand new pavements. With the paradigm of asset management shifting quickly towards the worlds of artificial intelligence and machine learning, Lachlan is looking forward to engineering innovative new solutions to some of time’s oldest problems.
Quotes:
“The most important thing point number one is that roads are actually quite complicated. There's a lot of thought that goes into it. It's not simply just slap a pavement down and you're good to go.”
“Paving so much more than just a you know, a slab of asphalt on the road. It's a living, breathing asset.”
“Road maintenance is pretty much exactly what it sounds. It's all the activities that you have to do to make sure the road stays safe to use and, and functional.”
“So safety is a big concern. We have equipment that can measure things like skid resistance, so to make sure that the road can actually offer enough friction to keep the vehicle on the road. You also have to think about public transport and other sort of aspects of infrastructure that rely on it…The services underneath the roads like gas, water, electrical, those usually rely on road infrastructure to an extent.”
“If you get to these [defects] nice and early, it makes it a lot cheaper and a lot more sustainable in the long run to keep this road going. So a road that would have lasted 10 years, you can perhaps stretch out to 20 or 30 years. That really is very, very important when you think about just how much raw material goes into building a new road… The less we have to totally rebuild roads, the better in terms of the environment.”
“These days, especially over the last 50 years, there's been a lot of investment into coming up with less qualitative and more quantitative systems [to measure road deterioration]. The most important one being is the pavement condition index.”
“Probably the biggest challenge actually is budget. Australia is a very very vast country. You've got so so many roads you know, some towns in you know, in the back can be 100-150 kilometres away, with only one road connecting.”
“You're never going to have enough money to fix everything. But it's important to make sure that with the resources you have you can optimize and do the absolute best you can possibly achieve.”
Links:
Pavement Management System’s Website
Pavement Management Services via Linkedin
Connect:
Connect with Lachlan McLean via Linkedin
Connect with Emily via email: emily@compassiot.com.au
Connect with Byte Size via LinkedIn
Connect with Compass IoT (the producer of this podcast) via our website