At Asphalt Test Track, Pavement Takes a Pounding

After 10 years of trucking the bumpy roads of America, Charles Patterson’s new job has him steering a big rig around a silky-smooth track.

Patterson’s workplace: the new National Center for Asphalt Technology, a 1.7-mile oval where trucks drive across various types of asphalt 16 hours a day, six days a week.

The traffic represents 10 million passes over two years, allowing researchers to observe a normal 20-year life span of an asphalt surface in two years.

The goal is to develop improved pavement surfaces that will increase traction, improve smoothness and reduce noise.

“This will allow us to greatly accelerate research into asphalt mixes that will last longer and provide greater safety, and ultimately save hundreds of millions of tax dollars,” said Ray Brown, the center’s director and a member of Auburn University’s civil engineering faculty.

The $7-million track, which was dedicated late last month and looks like a full-scale NASCAR layout, is part of a unique research project that is being funded in part by highway agencies around the South and elsewhere.

Patterson is one of a team of drivers who are already taking eight-hour shifts behind the wheel, each steering one of the three semis with trailers hauling 20,000-pound loads on each axle. Each truck is expected to log 450,000 miles in two years.

“They told me I would be going around a race track all day long,” said Patterson, a 43-year-old trucker from Riverdale, Ga., who is perfectly willing to leave the open road, and its dangers, behind.

After long-distance driving that took him to almost every state, Patterson said he has no reason to worry about boredom in the $800-a-week job “as long as Hank and Willie’s on the radio.”

“Doing this is a steady paycheck,” Patterson said, unlike dry spells in his long-distance driving. Each of the drivers also has hookups with a dispatcher.

At the track, there are no grandstands, and employees say they are discouraging visitors and sightseers, but all kinds of people are stopping by. One promoter of midget car races offered to fill the surrounding hillsides with spectators on weekends. His offer was declined.