Transportation I-270 Wide Paving

The final surface course placement configuration of the FRA 270 project was four mainline driving lanes with a 16-foot-wide inside shoulder and an 8-foot to 10-foot-wide outside shoulder. We elected to pave two mainline driving lanes and a shoulder at the same time thereby only having one cold longitudinal joint. Kokosing used a paving technique known as echelon paving to pave in the mainline lanes of traffic. This technique involves transferring material via an asphalt material transfer machine into two separate asphalt pavers. Echelon paving requires great communication between the asphalt transfer machine operator and the two asphalt paver operators. Paving the inside two lanes and shoulder make up 40 total feet in width; and, paving the outside two lanes and shoulder a total width of 34-feet. In both applications we were placing roughly a mile of new surface pavement at those widths each shift.