PROCESSING AND RECYCLING OF RUBBER AND OIL WASTES INTO HYDROCARBON FUEL BY METHOD OF PHYSICO-CHEMICAL ACTIVATION

Road user costs (respectively external costs) primarily refer to the monetized components of road (re)construction impacts, such as the user delay costs, vehicle operating costs, crash costs and air/noise pollution costs. The issue of user costs is closely related to decision making on investments in the transport infrastructure. Ability to define and properly estimate the user costs in the framework of road transport in general, while at the same time to find and include their local specifics promises to improve the above mentioned decision making process. The objective of this research paper was to assess the way of lowering these user costs by an alternative approach to the highway reconstruction - with the use of precast concrete pavements. Approaching this technology innovatively promises significant savings of the construction time and consequently the road user costs in comparison to the traditional cast-in-place construction method. Global experience and methods used for the road user costs' estimation were researched and analysed. Real data from a recently completed highway reconstruction project (using the traditional cast-in-place method) were used together with all the available data on socio-economic elements needed for the calculation. It led to an interesting and presumably generally valid result - road user costs, most often utterly ignored by the public investor, are more than double to those of the reconstruction itself. Comparison regarding the user costs' value of both before mentioned technological approaches to the highway reconstruction was then also performed. This led to the conclusion, that using the prefabricated pavements with their much shorter onsite construction period and lower road user costs results in a significant decrease of overall highway reconstruction costs.