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This paper discusses road damage caused by heavy commercial vehicles. Chapter 1 presents some important terminology and a brief historical review of road construction and vehicle-road interaction, from ancient times to the present day. The main types of vehicle-generated road damage, and the methods that are used by pavement engineers to analyze them are discussed in Chapter 2. Attention is also given to the main features of the response of road surfaces to vehicle loads and mathematical models that have been developed to predict road response. Chapter 3 reviews the effects on road damage of vehicle features which can be studied without consideration of vehicle dynamics. These include gross vehicle weight, axle and tire configurations, tire contact conditions and static load sharing in axle group suspensions. The dynamic tire forces generated by heavy vehicles are examined in Chapter 4.

An articulated lorry was instrumented in order to measure its performance in straight-line braking. The trailer was fitted with two interchangeable tandem axle subchassis, one with an air suspension and the other with a steel monoleaf 4-spring suspension. The brakes were only applied to the trailer axles, which were fitted with anti-lock braking systems (ABS). The vehicle with the steel suspension was observed to have significantly worse braking performance than the air suspension, and also to generate larger vertical dynamic tire forces. Computer models were developed for the two suspensions, including their brakes and anti-lock systems. The models were found to reproduce most of the important features of the experimental results.