Road construction and paving
A road is a structure lying on its back. What you see is three inches of asphalt; what carries the truck is the eight or ten inches of rock under it and the subgrade under that. We build the whole section, which is why we are still interested in the road five years after we paved it.
A public street a city will accept for maintenance. Built to the standard plan, inspected at every lift.
Typical R-value design for a residential street. The soils report sets the real numbers.
Feeds it8″ of base over 1,000 sq ft is about 48 tons, or 2 transfer loads. Our trucks, our rock.
What we build
- Subdivision and commercial streets built to city or county standard plans
- County road rebuilds: full-depth reclamation, new base, new mat
- Ranch, orchard, and industrial access roads, paved or all-weather rock
- Parking lots, truck yards, and equipment pads
- Grind and overlay, digouts, and full-depth patching
- Chip seal and slurry seal for surfaces that are still structurally sound
- Shoulder backing, widening, and turnouts
Sequence, bottom to top
Subgrade first: shaped, moisture conditioned, compacted, and proof rolled with a loaded truck so any soft spot shows up before it is buried. Soft spots get dug out and replaced, or get fabric, depending on which is cheaper for that particular hole.
Aggregate base next, in lifts, watered and rolled, then trimmed to grade. Base is where a road is won: the mat only distributes load, it does not carry it. We check base grade with the same GPS that cut the subgrade, because a half inch of extra base across a parking lot is real money and a half inch short is a thin mat.
Then asphalt, at the mix and lift thickness the spec calls for, laid at temperature and rolled in a pattern that gets density before the mat cools. Longitudinal joints get a tack coat and a rolling pattern of their own, because that joint is where almost every pavement failure begins.
Overlay, or rebuild
A pavement that is worn on top but sound underneath is a candidate for grind and overlay, or for a seal. A pavement that is alligator-cracked in the wheel path has a base or subgrade problem, and putting new asphalt over it buys about two summers.
The way to tell is to cut a core and look, or to watch the road under a loaded truck and see whether it moves. We would rather core it and tell you the road needs a rebuild than sell you an overlay we know will fail, because the second call is always the more expensive one.
Traffic, and keeping the road open
Most road work here happens on a road somebody needs. We build traffic control into the bid: signs, cones, flaggers where the plan calls for them, and a phasing plan that keeps at least one lane live where we can. On a county road with driveways, we sequence so nobody is landlocked overnight, and we tell the residents before we do it rather than after.
What paving runs
| Item | Range |
|---|---|
| Asphalt, placed and compacted | $110 to $175 per ton |
| New pavement, base and mat, typical parking lot | $5 to $10 per SF |
| Class 2 aggregate base, delivered and compacted | $45 to $70 per ton |
| Grind and overlay, 2 inch | $3.50 to $6.50 per SF |
| Chip seal | $1.75 to $3.50 per SF |
| Full-depth digout and patch | $18 to $40 per SF |
Unit ranges are what this kind of work has been going for in the Sacramento Valley, put here so you can sanity-check a budget. They are not a bid. Quantities, access, haul distance, and the spec move every one of them.
Questions we get
It depends on what drives on it and what is under it. A residential driveway lives on two inches over four to six of base. A subdivision street is typically three over eight. A truck yard wants four or five inches over ten to twelve, because loaded trucks turning in the same spot is the hardest thing you can do to a pavement. The hero drawing on the homepage shows all four side by side.
Asphalt plants in this valley run a seasonal schedule and hot mix needs a dry, unfrozen surface to bond to. We pave from roughly April into November. Winter is for base rock, underground, and getting subgrade ready so the mat can go down the first week the plant fires up.
We coordinate it. Striping, signage, and thermoplastic are done by a striping subcontractor on our contract, so it is one number and one schedule to you.
A day for passenger cars once the mat has cooled. Give it a couple of weeks of curing before parking loaded trailers or setting jack stands on it in July heat, and keep the first few hot weekends in mind: fresh asphalt scuffs under a turning wheel at low speed.
Photos are stand-ins until our own job photos are up: public domain images from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the National Park Service, plus freely licensed photos from Wikimedia Commons (CC0 and CC BY-SA 4.0).
Request a bid: road construction and paving
Scope, rough quantities, the town, and when the site is available. If there is a bid date on it, put the date and time in and we will confirm receipt the same day.
- The yard
- (530) 555-0142
- Bids and plan sets
- bids@northstateconstruction.com
- Where we work
- Butte, Glenn, Tehama, Colusa, Shasta, Sutter, and Yuba counties
- Yard at 4180 Midway, Chico, CA 95928
CSLB Class A General Engineering · license pending, expected June