Resilient_Roads

You're clearly the expert here, so why don't you do an AMA to tell everyone what I'm doing wrong? It's not like Michigan DOT has kind of led the way in this research specifically because it has the potential to outperform existing methods in difficult environments. And one of the biggest precast pavement companies hasn't installed most of their pavements in the northeast, or anything. I doubt upstate New York sees much snow, and Canada's practically summer all year. I bet Colorado never has cold weather.

Five years ago, it was two or three times the price of poured concrete. Now, we're down to a 50-80% premium against concrete. In five years, it'll be the same price or 20% more depending on the job. Within ten years, it'll be about 20% less than poured concrete.

This is the same dynamic that precast has seen in precast architectural products, when precast architectural was new, it was twice the price, now it's 20% less than poured. The same happened with box culverts, precast pipe, and all the other things precast is used for.

The biggest thing to remember is that asphalt and concrete have had more than 1,000,000 miles installed to reduce their costs - precast pavement has only had about 50 miles installed so far. As we increase our volume, prices will fall dramatically.

Another consideration is that by embedding ITS products into the pavement, we can provide subscription based services such as wireless EV charging and driverless car navigation that can actually generate enough revenue that the road can pay for itself - but that's a little bit, er, well... down the road.

Today!

One of our competitors has built more than 25 miles of precast highways. There's been more than a dozen DOT projects using precast, and nearly half the states have implemented specifications that allow them to use precast pavements.

As far as I know, we're the only company that does precast roads for cities, as opposed to highways, and this was one of our demo sites. We expect to sell a couple miles of precast streets in the next year, and keep growing from there.

Absolutely, and it can extend the work season since you can cast the slabs indoors.

Legos and those wooden train sets are very much inspirations for this kind of stuff.