Footpath and Cycleway – Best Practice Design and Construction Methods

Abstract

Footpaths and Cycleways are an important feature of many people’s daily lives; walking your children to school, getting exercise, or just going for a walk around the neighbourhood. Footpaths are intended to create a safe environment for any activity that utilises this infrastructure. A lot of planning and forethought goes into ensuring this happens; appropriate lighting, trees for shade, signage, and most importantly, the pavement design and construction of the concrete surface that you walk, run or cycle on. This paper outlines best practice design and construction methods and will address some of the following questions: • Why is my footpath cracking? • Why are the joints moving, causing trip hazards? • What is causing all those cracks? How can all this be avoided? With a few simple design detail updates and establishing clear and open lines of communication with your construction teams, we can all make a huge improvement on the quality and safety of our community’s footpaths and cycleways. This in turn, significantly reduces the cost and effort consumed in the repair, maintenance, or replacement of our pathway networks. Topics of discussion: • Concrete Mix Design • Path Thickness and Dowels • Joint Design o Expansion o Construction o Weakened Plane o Articulating, and o Isolation • Joint Layout o Spacing o Utilities o Trees (root-heave) o Panel Ratio (L:W) etc • Restraint Cracking • Corrosion Construction Methods (Best-Practice) • Ordering Concrete (slump and adding water) • Formwork/Stripping • Expansion Joints - proprietary systems • Dowel Installation • Reinforcing - steel mesh or synthetic fibres • Concrete Placement and Consolidation • Finishing and Weakened Plane Joints • Tips and Tricks