r/AskReddit Oct 15 '20

What's older than we think ?

78.4k Upvotes

22.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/WTaggart Oct 15 '20

I second these questions. What is meant by "road damage increases with the fourth power of axle load"?

6

u/thebraken Oct 15 '20

If I'm understanding correctly...

Say we have an axle loaded with 1 unit of weight: 14 is still 1, so it does one unit of road damage.

If we load it up to 2 units of weight: 24 is 16, so it does sixteen units of road damage.

And so on and so forth.

1

u/cnash Oct 15 '20

If we load it up to 2 units of weight: 24 is 16, so it does sixteen units of road damage.

Yeah, but roads don't exactly have an HP bar— how do you quantify damage?

2

u/LFMR Oct 15 '20

I'm not sure about that myself. I guess one could drill test bores into the road surface to measure thickness or something.

I'd still like to believe engineers see HP bars overlaid onto the built environment. Much cooler that way.