Cost of tarmacadaming road

[MM]

How much very roughly (plus/minus £500) does it cost to re-surface a road? This would include planing off the old surface.

Let's say, per metre of road 'length' by the standard road width in new housing developments (I estimate the road in question is about 5 m wide).

Our estate (new development) was tarmacked for the first time, following completion of all building works, in mid-December, 2004. Since then the council highways people have taken core samples (mid-March) and some of the pavements have had to be re-surfaced since then. Yesterday, the gangers came back and planed off the whole road surface throughout the development. Obviously, the standard of work was not acceptable to the highways department (apparently councils will not assume responsibility for maintaining the roads until they are satisfied that the surfacing has been carried out to an acceptable standard).

Someone, I assume the developer, who has long since departed to pastures/developments new, will have to pay for the resurfacing work to be done, and I'm trying to work out what kind of costs are involved overall.

MM

[Sam Nelson]

Recent experience suggests that this depends a lot on the current state of the surface.

3m gets you a decent family-car-capable single-track road: I'd've thought yours is wider than that. I can't tell you anything about planing, because my job doesn't involve it.

The last bit of road to my house runs over industrial archaeology, basically: the mills which produced 90-odd% of the tartan made in Scotland between about

1830 and 1930 were reduced to rubble outside what's become my front door. I've just had a quote for the most-potholed 25m x 3m stretch, which will need mechanically swept off, tack-coated, flattened with a layer (compacted), and surfaced with a layer (compacted) and it works out at about GBP25/sqm.

I have a couple of contacts in the council roads business, and they a) recommended the contractor in the first place, and b) seem to approve of the quote and description of the work, the intended material described as `brilliant stuff - what I'd use on my drive' by a local roads inspector. The job is slightly complicated by the fact that the only access has an

18-tonne weight limit on it.

I guess there are various ways of making the job cheaper, but in the current circumstances I'd rather shell out for a good job that'll last `forever' (given current traffic patterns) than have to revisit it in a few years' time.

Did that help? You'd have to find out about planing and disposal for yourself but assuming the underlying structure is OK it ought to be possible to sweep that, make it sticky, and slap a layer on. If there's someone not too far away doing land reclamation (a sailing club boatpark springs to mind here: can't think why...) they might just be glad enough of the planed material to pay you for it.

[MM]

Yes, that helped, thanks, Sam! It's not that I want to do any tarmackadaming myself, but that I suspect the original job may have been done on the cheap, and I wonder what else might go wrong. Best to be prepared, just in case! At £25/sqm, that's an awful lost of dosh for the whole estate, I can tell you. Maybe insurance companies will foot the bill, though.

MM

[Sam Nelson]

Presumably economies of scale would cut in: my job is only 75sqm. From where I'm looking at it, it's an expensive piece of carpet, but there again it is out in all weathers with cars driving over it...

[The Natural Philosopher]

It's no worse than any other bit of outdoor 'flooring' frankly.

Concrete - tarmac - paviors - slabs - they all end up in that ball park or worse!

[David]

In article , MM writes

If its over say 5,000m2 in total it will work out around £15-18/m2 including the planing, a lot of the planing cost is taken up with getting the expensive eqpt to site so small jobs cost a lot more/metre than big jobs.

[MM]

I spoke to the workers laying the Tarmac. They aren't getting paid. The first lot of Tarmac delivered to them back in December was dodgy, and that's why they're having to do it again at their cost, which is £12,000. I assume they will be able to recover their costs from the Tarmac supplier, though.

MM