Residential roads
Advice, guidance and information about the design and construction of residential roads, including the highway pavement and specification requirements, is provided in the Road and Pavements Specification document. The following sections are covered:
- Road Preliminaries
- Road Sub-Base and Capping Layer
- Road Pavement
- Kerbing and Edge Restraint
- Footways, Footpaths and Cycleways
Materials and techniques specified in this section are those that are commonly used. However, alternative materials and techniques for road construction, that are not included within this section, may become widely available and will require KCC approval prior to use.
When selecting highways materials for a proposal, consulting the supplementary Standard Palette of Materials document is recommended, which exemplifies materials that have been successfully used on previous development sites.
Where the applicant wishes to propose to use materials that fall outside the scope of these documents, it will be required to make a detailed proposal to the Highway’s Asset Manager using our Technical Approval Process for Highway Assets in good time to permit their evaluation and approval prior to the relevant work proceeding. An Outline Technical Review is recommended prior to this – additional information can be found here.
The proposal will need to demonstrate that the materials offer a long lifecycle, lower lifecycle costs, and ease of maintainability. A commuted sum* may be applied where the use of such materials will result in increased future maintenance costs.
* A Commuted Sum is a charge levied by the Highway Authority to cover future forecast maintenance expenses for construction materials within adoption areas which have a higher maintenance cost for the Highway Authority.
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Industrial and commercial roads
The design of industrial and commercial roads, including the thickness of foundation and pavement construction, must be determined in accordance with the latest version of the national guidance document Design Manual for Road and Bridges, for the estimated volume of traffic, as agreed with KCC.