![]() It was the early 1900s, really, when we started to get to more of a, what you would think of the type of paving you see now where you have black top roads and some concrete roadways. And so we now use asphalt and really we don’t use tar. That’s the main difference between the two. Tar comes from a process from coal and asphalt comes from oil. ![]() Then as the oil industry boomed, we started using asphalt and asphalt and tar are not the same thing. So late 1800s, you know, bricks mixing the tar in the top were the most popular types of roads in the U.S. And so you want a hard surface, that’s all weather. They called it tarmac.Īnd of course, a lot of people used, uh, bricks in the larger cities. So they mixed the tar into the crushed rock. So that’s kinda where that came from because the person that created crushing the rock, his name was McAdam. So that was kind of brought over with the British to the United States and we started with a crushed rock and then to kind of keep the dust down, they would mix tar into the top.Īnd so that became your first paved road, as we would see like a black top, a tar road, tarmac, you’ve heard that term. In the 1800s in England, they started to take those Roman roads and try to improve them the way that they were designed. And that was brought over because that was the common practice. And they were just basically a gravel roadway. They’ve heard of the Roman roads they’re still finding them. The first roads were very similar to the Roman roads. Well, I appreciate the opportunity to talk about highway research.Ĭan we start with a little history? I’m wondering if you could tell us when paved roads were first introduced in America and what they were like. Darlene is a research engineer at TTI, and she leads the Institute’s Pavement and Materials Division. We’ve invited Darlene Goehl to join us for this conversation, to help us understand more about the humble roadway. That’s certainly true regarding the surfaces that we drive upon every day. I’m Bernie Fette with the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. ![]() This is Thinking Transportation - conversations about how we get ourselves and the things we need from one place to another.
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