The cross sections of the shoulders are different from those of the traffic lanes. And the constructions of the traffic lanes and the shoulders are conducted seperately. Due to these differences between the traffic lanes and the shoulders, problems fr...
The cross sections of the shoulders are different from those of the traffic lanes. And the constructions of the traffic lanes and the shoulders are conducted seperately. Due to these differences between the traffic lanes and the shoulders, problems frequently occur at the interface of the two. Those include the wide crack widths, spalling of concrete and the differences in the vertical displacements at the interface. The main objective of this study is to develop a design method which can be used to prevent failures at the interface between the traffic lanes and the shoulders. The differences in the several kinds of shoulders were investigated, and the reasons of failures of the shoulders were studied. And, it was conducted to adopt the tapered thicknesses to shoulder section and new material such as porous concrete to shoulder materials. The Field test was conducted to investigate several items of this research such as checking the problems in real constructing the new section and obtaining field data. In this study, it is concluded that the full depth design of shoulders needs to be applied to some sites where the encroaching and parking traffic will be heavy. Also, it was proposed that the consistent design flow for determining the thickness of shoulders. The selective design concept, shoulder thickness design procedure, tapered thickness, and the joint analysis of shoulders which were extracted from this research, will make contributions to the developments of highway systems.