Road construction of the future: cost savings of up to 30% possible
By 2030, European governments plan to spend around 100 billion euros annually on the construction of new roads - a study by McKinsey and Oxford Global Projects shows: digital technologies can cut the costs of projects by 30% and shorten the construction time by 50% - networked road systems could make traffic up to 50% more effective
Road construction, which is traditionally rather poor in innovation, is facing a revolution in the next few years: the use of digital technologies can reduce the costs of building new roads by 30%. With an annual investment volume of 100 billion euros by 2030 by European countries alone, savings of around 30 billion euros per year are possible. This is the conclusion reached by experts from McKinsey & Company and Oxford Global Projects in a current study entitled “Road work ahead”. For their analysis, the management consultancy and the leading think tank for the management of megaprojects evaluated all of the world's relevant studies on trends in road construction and interviewed more than 30 experts.
The biggest cost driver in the road construction industry is the speed factor. “It takes an average of 5.5 years from the decision to build a new road to the completion of a road with 88 kilometers of lane,” says Sebastian Stern, senior partner at McKinsey and co-author of the study. During the construction work, machines would have to be rented, workers paid and existing roads closed - that costs a lot of money, especially if the construction time sometimes takes twice as long as originally planned. On average, the costs of the projects exceed the budgeted budget by 20%. The authors of the study come to the conclusion that these cost-intensive long-term construction sites can be avoided in the future: "The use of digital technologies can reduce the average construction time of a road by 50%," says Stern.
How digital technologies accelerate the construction process
Even before the decision to build a new road, time-consuming needs analyzes could be dispensed with, as authorities could fall back on anonymized geographic data from smartphones and navigation systems. Industry experts estimate that this would limit the calculation of various road parameters to one month. If the decision to build a new building is in place, innovative technologies could shorten the construction phase, which currently lasts up to a year, to two months.
Landscapes, for example, are already being scanned with lasers, thereby creating exact models of the terrain. With this and other data, engineers can virtually recreate the road in a 5D model. "With the help of the digital twin, possible construction difficulties can be anticipated and thus avoided," says Bent Flyvbjerg, Chairman of the Board of the Oxford Global Project and Chairman of Major Program Management at the Saïd Business School at Oxford University. Once the planning has been completed, the construction work could begin: This could be accelerated considerably through automated processes and novel materials. All in all, the authors anticipate a decrease in costs from currently around 2 million US dollars to 1.6 million US dollars per kilometer of road.
Sensors make the streets intelligent
However, the roads of tomorrow will not only be significantly cheaper than they are today, they will also be intelligent: "Over the next few decades, our road network will develop from a passive medium, into a measurement and control system that communicates with cars," explains Flyvbjerg. For this purpose, sensors are used in new roads to be built or positioned around existing roads. Because cars could drive much closer together ("platooning"), the road network could be used up to 50% more effectively - traffic jams could be a thing of the past.
So that the sensors in the street do not break, they have to remain in good condition for a long time - at the same time, important building materials such as sand are becoming increasingly scarce. The solution to these challenges could be novel building materials such as plastic. Plastic pellets, for example, which are added to the asphalt mass, are suitable for this purpose. "Initial tests from the Netherlands show that these roads are up to 60% more robust than conventional roads," says Stern. Another advantage: the method could soon be used to recycle hundreds of thousands of tons of plastic waste.
About the method:
The analysis was carried out in collaboration between the management consultancy McKinsey and Oxford Global Projects, a company specializing in large-scale projects. Scientists from both institutions worked together for over 18 months to investigate the future of road construction. The authors analyzed all important studies on the subject of road construction and interviewed over 30 experts in order to understand current challenges and assess the potential of new technologies. In addition, the scientists use the in-house database of the Oxford Global Project to avoid cost and deadline overruns in road construction projects and mega-projects.