A14 THE FREE PRESS PEOPLE AUGUST 4, 1996 ^OEPENOt^ FOODS LOCALLY OWNED AND OPERATED YOUR FRIENDLY NEIGHBOURHOOD GROCER Open Wwukuj August 5 YOUR SAFE WAY TO EXTRA FOOD VALUE WITH NO OVER WAITING FOR FRIENDLY SERVICE Roads run uphill Your car won’t give as good mileage on blacktop highway as on cement because on asphalt it is always running uphill. This is one of the more obscure facts about highways and cars discovered by Our Man Stanley. He was disappointed at the news, having always preferred asphalt, preferably with a noisy, pebbly surface, because he liked the sound and he felt safer. Highways may appear as solid as the pyramids but they are, in fact, a bit rubbery. All of them, cement or blacktop, are depressed by the weight of each vehicle which moves across them, thousands of times as much for a truck as for a car, but the blacktop is more supple than cement. Your car moves, as it were, at the bottom of a saucer, always trying to climb up the rim. The same things happens, in exaggerated form, when you drive a car on lake ice. Don Gillespie is one of the provincial highways engineers who takes out instruments which measure how much our highways are flexing in order to help determine when rebuilding is necessary. For a conventional blacktop road, it’s about 15 years between construction and rebuilding, which makes the family house seem pretty permanent, doesn’t it? He told Our Man Stanley many surprising things about roadbuilding, something which turns Mr. Gillespie’s crank. One way of describing a modern highway such as the Coquilhalla or the 401 out of Vancouver is to call it linear landfill, he says. The asphalt topping is the final waste that comes from oil refineries and if we weren’t using it at such a rate to build and rebuild roads, we would have a dreadful problem in finding ways to dispose of the stuff. But, then, of course, if we had no roads we’d have no cars and the refineries would shut down for lack of customers. The horseless carriage makes strange economics. Engineers grind up a womout asphalt surface and use it again. “You can’t keep STRAIGHT WRY Paul St. Pierre putting new asphalt on top of old because eventually your highway would look like a trestle and there would be ferocious drops to its shoulders,” he says. Also, in cities and towns, manhole covers which are supposed to be flush with street would become wells and spring breakers. They also make interesting additives to it. Ground up automobile tires being one. As an engineer, a man who can do for one dollar what any damn fool can do for two dollars, Mr. Gillespie is continuously experimenting. There is, for example, a little bridge on 401 opposite Superstore in Burnaby where the pitch is so sharp that the wheels of speeding trucks leave the ground when they cross it. At both sides of this bridge, the highway must be built up but, in building up, they add to the weight and the extra weight depresses the road further, requiring more building, a Catch 22 situation. Recently they replaced some of the base beneath the road surface with styrofoam which you and I think of as packaging for Japanese computers. All roads, as you might expect, rely much more for their quality on the 300 Mms of crushed gravel and 300 Mms of sand or other base than they do on the 100 MM of asphalt surface. As you might not expect, imperfections at the surface usually have little to do with the surface but reflect conditions far below. Like many drivers, when Our Man Stanley encountered ridges in the blacktop he always thought they were the result of trucks that were too heavily loaded travelling the road while the asphalt was still hot. Not so. The trouble, says Mr. Gillespie, is the shifting of the material in the road base and no amount of redoing the surface will cure the problem, the road must be rebuilt completely. Mr. Gillespie also explained why some highway corners that look easy are tire squealers if you take them fast. Curvature and banking are the two reasons. The curves of any highway should be built to a single radius and if you enter the corner without undue s\vay or tire squeal you should continue throughout the curve with no difficulty. However some of our older mountain roads had curves of more than one radius and the corners, as drivers say, "wind up on you.” It’s one reason the yellow slow signs are occasionally lower than the appearance of a corner indicates. Another problem is banking. A road’s sharp comer should be tilted like the roller coaster at the playgrounds, even if not so much. Usually they are so tilted, with due regard for ice conditions in winter and truck speeds on hills. However on some corners adequate drainage can only be achieved by a reverse bank which has a tendency to send your car off into the rhubard. Our Man Stanley came away from the interview with one victory. It’s true that rough, unfinished, pebbly, noisy asphalt surface has the best adhesion qualities. ’86 CORVETTE CONVERTIBLE ONLY 69,000 KMS. Automatic, fully loaded, only $19,900. For more information call Bob Bissonette at Northland Chrysler 562-5254 DLN7734 Friskies CAT FOOD 380 g 57 0 DAD'S SO COOKIES ml 700 - 800 g bag L37 Kraft A 0k CHEESE SLICES J 500 g ^0 I.67 Maxwell House \ (57 COFFEE Vj Reg, Fine, Ex-Fine, 300 g Kraft jjk h 47 PEANUT Xfi BUTTER yU Smooth/Crunchy 1 kq " Dairyland GRAB-A-JUG JUICE 1 L 77 0 Old Dutch A TORTILLA CHIPS v 375 a ASST. VARIETIES 1 I.77 COKE, *4 SPRITE, ALE, or FLAVOURS v f Reg or Diet 1 47 2 L ■ | ^dep. Uptons NOODLES ’N SAUCE 120- 137g 97 ( Bananas 2 for 97c Ellendale Mandarins 970 Australian Grown. 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