Abstract

One of the major factors endeavors to preserve the lives of those

traveling the roadways all over the world is using well designed,
strong, durable and safe roadways. The maintenance of roadways and
the application of safety planning into every part of construction and
the neatly working with stakeholders of transportation safety is one of
the channels paid lot of attention by government worldwide. Extensive
efforts are conducted by road sector to reduce the risks induced by the
bad pavements conditions in addition to other causes procured by
driver behavior and vehicle maintenance. Because having an accurate
picture and understanding of the effect of road construction materials
on traffic safety is key to the felicitous achievement of roadways virtue
plans of management, the current work has been carried out to
reviewing and highlighting the technologies in particular the
innovative used to enhance the properties of materials used in
transport structures that deals with increasing road strength and
durability as well as traffic safety improvement to reduce roadways
accidents. Innovation in using polymer and geopolymer concrete
composites, solar panels, supplementary cementing materials, self-
healing materials, shape-memory alloy and illuminating cement are
included.
Introduction
It is well documented that driver training and behavior, vehicle
maintenance, in addition to the road design aspects, the road
pavement conditions represented by the pavement age and
construction materials types and quality, are the factors have positive
effect on the accidents risk [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]. A growing amount of
research has examined the human risk factors impact on traffic
accident frequency, however, pavement conditions paid less attention.
The inappropriate pavements owing to the increased traffic volumes
and pavement life may lead to massive and damaging effects on
surface degradation caused by extreme weather and heavy traffic. The
surface deformations, cracks and potholes form the causes of majority
of the accidents, they may be the reasons of the reduction of the
available friction between the vehicle tires and the pavement thus
causes the unexpected acceleration on the vehicle [6]. The causes of
damage to urban roads may be relevant to different factors including
flooding of roads due to inadequate storm water system, the ineffective
function of the sub surface drain because of the absent of
embankment, causes surface cracks caused by standing truck that
allowing water to enter damaging the road crust, frequent braking
action and wearing coat not being designed to sustain heavy tractive
frequent force causes damages specially at junction, not following the
speciation and standards in respect of maintaining temperature at
laying and compaction, absence of god quality bitumen, bituminous
treatment is not fuel spillage resistant and failure of research
institutes/academicians to evolve specifications to suit urban
problems [7]. The objective of the current work is focused on
reviewing and highlighting the technologies used to enhance the
properties of the materials used in transport structures that deal with
increasing road strength and durability as well as traffic safety
improvement.
Since the first Roman roads built around 4,000 BCE from stone and
timber, the methods of constructing roads have altered a lot such as
brick and granite block were then widely used prior to paving roads by
asphalt. It was pointed out that the risks caused by automobile
accidents were reduced on roads paved with brick and granite blocks
due to the slow rate of driving on the rough pavement [8]. However,
asphalt and/or concrete tend to be used to construct the pavement of
modern roads. The setting out, earthworks and paving construction
are the three processes which can describe the construction steps of a
road [9], [10]. The construction elements of a pavement are a natural
soil sub-grade covered by a superimposed layers of processed
materials. The primary function of the soil sub-grade is to distribute
the applied vehicle loads. Accordingly, the enhancement of the road
strength and durability could be achieved by improving the soil, base
courses and surface course materials. The innovations in such
materials are a topic of pervious and ongoing researches for
construction safe roadways. Road pavements are classified to flexible
and rigid pavements; these two classes are furthered classified to sub
classes. Rigid pavements normally use Portland cement concrete as
the prime structural element. Depending on conditions, engineers may
design the pavement slab with plain, lightly reinforced, continuously
reinforced, pre-stressed, or fibrous concrete. The type of aggregate can
have a predominant effect on pavement performance and durability.
When sound materials are used, crushed rock aggregate resulting in
concrete with higher flexural strength than uncrushed aggregates for
comparable mixes. Also, the strength of cement has significant impact
on the compressive and flexural strength of concrete pavements i.e.
with identical water-cement ratio, concrete of higher compressive and
flexural strength is produced when formulated with higher strength
cement [11]. Rigid and flexible pavement may suffer from different
types of failures including damages in the form of potholes and heavy
damage to surface [12], [13], [14]. Different technologies and
innovative materials are recently used to prevent road pavement
defects. The introduction of new equipment, additives, and the
improvement in concrete technology has enabled road engineers to
construct high quality roads.

Section snippets

Pavement stabilization technologies

The alteration of the intrinsic properties of a pavement material or
earthworks materials by the addition of a stabilization agent including
a binder or granular material to meet performance expectations during
its application is a simple definition of the process pavement
stabilization. The cost-effective method for improving the long-term
performance of heavily-trafficked pavements is achieved by applying
the proper stabilization technology for stabilizing and recycling
materials for pavement 

Innovation in road construction

Innovation in road construction offers important industry and
community benefits, it refers to using advanced technologies and
optimum materials for the purpose of road construction [36]. For
concrete roads, several innovations emerged in producing developed
types of concretes such as fiber reinforced concrete (FRC), Ultra High-
performance concrete (UHPC), self-compacting concrete (SCC) and
High performance concrete (HPC) [37]. Besides, in the last two
decades, lot of attention has been paid

Future trends in construction of high quality pavements

Road construction technology, maintenance and cost are highly
affected by the materials used in road construction, so to satisfy the
use requirement, it is essential to study new pavement materials. The
spreading of nanomaterial technology and using sustainable binding
materials with improved viscoelastic range, and the integration of
asphalt and concrete materials into the category of smart materials
that tends to the functional characteristics that traditional pavement
materials do not have

Conclusions
Materials used in road construction have significant role in
transportation safety. Roadways of adequate design and construction
materials have long service life. Materials used in road construction
may have a greater or lesser service life depending upon
circumstances; therefore the selection of the appropriate materials for
road construction is an essential element in road construction
projects. Different technologies and innovative materials are recently
used in road construction including

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Ibtisam Kamal: Resources, Supervision, Writing - review &
editing. Yousif Bas: Resources, Visualization.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to
influence the work reported in this paper.