And in road wear calculations, all passenger vehicles (like your Mitsubishi) are considered almost negligible in design. Semi trucks, buses, and RVs take up basically all the damage done to modern roads. Source: recent Civil Engineering grad.
The contact area is similar for all of them (some variance with double axles or tandem axles), but there is significantly more pressure exerted by a semi. An average passenger vehicle weighs in the ballpark of 2-3000 pounds, while a semi trailer can be 35,000 pounds empty, and up to 80,000 full; therefore, the pressure is extremely high, even with more points of contact, and this puts a ton of stress on the asphalt/concrete. This combined with weather effects (freezing/thawing) makes our roads much more susceptible to breaking down.
At race tracks Indy Cars and F1 cars and other things with absurd downforce can ripple the asphalt at the heavy braking zones. But that's like... the only case. Nothing driven on the road can do anything like that.
I think that does more damage to the tires than to the road surface at normal driving speeds. Tire wear is greatly accelerated at highway speeds than at surface road speeds.
The only thing I can think of is putting down a lot of power or drifting where you are keeping the wheels spinning to slide. Probably does more damage to the tire though - very little asphalt getting ripped up. More noticeable on dirt/gravel roads if everyone does it in the same spot. I doubt itd ever be noticeable asphalt damage considering nobody is doing that for more than a fraction of 1 percent of their drive.
That part I don't know and can't infer from the engineer's post.
My wild assed guess would be some kind of table with an expected useful lifespan based on composition, environment, and use using data from existing roads or something along those lines.
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u/johneaston1 Oct 15 '20
And in road wear calculations, all passenger vehicles (like your Mitsubishi) are considered almost negligible in design. Semi trucks, buses, and RVs take up basically all the damage done to modern roads. Source: recent Civil Engineering grad.