This is a highway bridge in Pennsylvania.

There’s multiple scenarios, generally most higher trafficked routes have asphalt design life of 10-13 years. PennDOT tends to milk it couple more years so it’s basically fucked before they pave it over like 15 years sometimes. If it’s a lower traffic Route in rural areas it is basically tar and chipped (aka fresh chips and oil) every 3 years and a mill and pave every 2-3 decades. Now going to the way roads are paved, in rural areas the asapgalt is like basically not much due to most roads being basically tar infused aggregate till like let’s say the 70s, even the 90s in some places and those roads don’t get the traffic to get the full re do.

Look at google street view history for the interstates you can see the cycles of good pavement bad pavement. It is basically 7 years before pavement starts showing some signs of distress. Now there’s also other factors like if there’s tree canopies or areas where water just stays in the asphalt and not evaporate due to lack of sunlight wind etc which in freeze thaw does blow up. Issue is roadways you gotta literally excavate 2-3 feet down or basically redo the entire road to the bottom especially with interstates to get it to a point it won’t heave.

Design life of interstates before a full scale rehabilitation is 50 years. Most early US interstates are about there. PennDOT has started on some already with full depth reconstructions all the way down to the sub grade and the turnpike already went through quite a bit already. When you see new asphalt pavement that’s technically a band aid that gets it by for another decade until it meets either it’s 50 or 100 year rehabilitation life. Same with bridges. Stuff back when the system was built was for a 50 year design life. All the replacements are 100 year design life. There’s stuff from the 70s where the bridge is basically 100 year design life except the deck which is 50 for some reason.

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