A trio of Sudbury roads will reap most of the benefits of the additional $10.2 million in additional federal gas tax funding, but a portion of it will go towards an experiment in asphalt recycling that hasn't been used in Ontario in 16 years.
This funding comes in addition to the $9.8 million in gas tax funding the city had already earmarked to be spent on roads, water and wastewater budgets. City council approved a recommendation on June 11 that will see the additional funding split between a trio of road rehabilitation projects, as well as cover a shortfall for roads projects that were included in the 2019 city budget.
The rehabilitatation project will come in at a cost of $5.9 million, with $3.6 million to be used to cover the funding needs of the 2019 roads capital program.
The remaing $700,000, a relatively small chunk of the $10.2 million in additional funding, will be used for a pilot project that could potentially save the city thousands on road repairs in the future and extend the life cycle of the city's road network.
The city's roads department will be piloting something that has never been done in Sudbury when it comes to road repair, testing the effectiveness of hot-in-place recycling. This method of road repair was used by the Ministry of Transportation between 1987 and 2003, but the contractors who provided the service moved out of the province in 2003 and the industry dried up.
"The MTO has made a conscious effort to restart the industry," Shelsted said. "Last year, they put out one contract and this year they've put another out to bring contractors back into the province.
"In my career, it's never been an option because there are no contractors in Ontario, but with MTO making an effort to return this to the province, we're willing to look at it as another option for recycling asphalt."
How hot-in-place works is essentially as it sounds: a machine pre-heats the asphalt on the ground and softens it before it's scraped off and dropped behind the machine. The hot mixture is picked up and dropped into a mixing device where it's rejuvenated and put into a spreader and laid back down as "new" road.
"Asphalt is one of the most recycled materials in the world and we've done a lot of cold-in-place recycling here in Sudbury, which is where the asphalt is ground up and milled and then we can either process it with an emulsion right in place or with asphalt cement without adding the heat to it," said Shelsted.
When it comes to hot-in-place recylcing, Shelsted explains that the road in question has to be at a certain standard for it to be considered. There can not be foundational cracking or a significant amount of pothole patching. He said hot-in-place recycling significantly extends the lifespan of a road as it's a form of preventative maintenance rather than reactive maintenance, which does little to extend the lifespan and condition of the road.
"The hot-in-place certainly has that potential to get the public a little annoyed because they would see the crews working on a road that isn't actually in terrible shape, and they're wondering why aren't they fixing roads that need more immediate attention," said Shelsted.
"What that's doing though, it's greatly extending the life of that road so we're not having to go back and keep fixing it every year."
The pilot project isn't expected to start until 2020, as the city's roads department will have to analyze the most suitable location to test and return to the operations committee with a report by August or September.
"With any pilot project we want to select the right place with the right treatment," said Shelsted. "If we select the wrong location and it's a failure, it's not the fault of the treatment, it's the fault of the location selection. We just want to make sure that we have it right so that we give it every chance to succeed."
As previously reported, the three main roads that will be resurfaced thanks to the gas tax funding are:
- Barry Downe Rd (MR66) from Westmount Ave to Hawthorne Dr ($2 million)
- Kingsway (MR55) from Bancroft Dr to Silver Hills Dr ($1.8 million)
- Regent St (MR46) from Walford Rd to York St ($2.1 million)
These projects are all expected to go out to tender this week, said City of Greater Sudbury roads director Dave Shelsted.
"What we basically did was we took a look at what was coming up and what were our needs on an asset management basis," said Shelsted. "So we have some additional cash and we look at what would be our immediate future projects; we had a bad pothole season and we looked at where were our main locations to fix these potholes."
The $5.9 million assigned to these three projects will rehab a total of 13.4 lane kilometres of road. While these three roads were all high on the priority list, the additional gas tax funding helps expedite the process, Shelsted said, and the city can get to work on these roads as soon as they are tendered out.
Soaring costs for road repairs caused the city to undervalue a number of other rehabilitation projects that were in the roads budget, and the funding could not have come at a better time as council approved assigning $3.6 million to cover the costs in the existing road capital program to allow the 2019 program to be completed.
"We've seen a dramatic increase in tender prices so in order to do what we said we would do in the previous budgets we need more money, otherwise we'd have to claw back a couple of projects," said Shelsted.
"Prices are generally higher and treatment costs a bit more than what they did last year. The glue in the asphalt was $588 per ton in January and it's gone up to $850 per ton now, so that's almost a 45-per-cent increase. Steel prices have gone gone up as well. We've seen a dramatic increase in concrete. This isn't just here in Sudbury, this is being felt in communities throughout Ontario."
