Description

This course helps supervisory personnel and operators better understand the materials, techniques, and equipment needed for maintaining gravel roads. It will also review new techniques and ideas in gravel road maintenance. The course is made up of 6 lessons, each containing narrated presentations and quizzes to check understanding, followed by a final quiz.

The course was designed to help students succeed. One way we accomplish this goal is by allowing students to take the quizzes and final test as many times as necessary until they understand the curriculum. Students may repeat the lesson or parts of the lesson and then test themselves again. Test questions change with each attempt.

Students who have already taken the classroom version of this workshop can test and refresh their knowledge, become familiar and comfortable with computer-based training, and earn an additional credit by taking the online training.

Course Lessons

• The properly shaped gravel road
• Distresses in gravel roads and drainage
• Adding gravel
• Shaping the roadway
• Dust control
• Equipment Innovations

Course Objectives

By the end of this course, you should be able to:

• Identify the proper road crown shape and cross-slope, the roadway parts that handle drainage, common shaping problems, and four areas that require a different shape than a normal crown.
• Identify the six major categories of gravel road distress, assess their severity, explain the functions of ditches, culverts, and underdrains, and describe causes of excess roadway moisture and options for improving drainage.
• Identify the three critical phases of regraveling, calculate gravel requirements and spread distance, implement proper surface preparation techniques, and identify the components of good gravel.
• Describe key safety and maintenance procedures for operating a motor grader, identify defects requiring reshaping, explain when to reshape and maintain gravel roads, describe efficient motor grader operation and use of its components, and explain the differences between wet and dry blading.
• Explain the reasons to consider dust control, describe how dust control works, and identify the most commonly used stabilizers.
• Identify equipment innovations, including windrow pulverizers, carbide-tipped bits and cutting edges, shouldering disks, grader-mounted dozer blades, and grader-mounted rollers, and describe what each does.

Who Should Take This Course

Supervisors, operators, and township officials responsible for maintaining gravel roads and anyone interested in gravel road maintenance.

Credit

• Students will earn Roads Scholar Program: Maintenance Certificate (1.0 Credit)
• To the best of our knowledge, this course meets the continuing education requirements for 12.5 PDHs as outlined in Minnesota Statute 326.107. More information concerning continuing education for professionals is online.
• Students who have previously taken the classroom version of the LTAP Gravel Road Maintenance and Design workshop may earn additional credit by taking the online version.

More Information

For more information or with questions about the course, please contact mnltap@umn.edu.

Sponsors

This course is offered by the Minnesota Local Technical Assistance Program (LTAP) at the Center for Transportation Studies, University of Minnesota. Minnesota LTAP is sponsored by the Minnesota Local Road Research Board (LRRB) and the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). This course is subsidized through funding from LRRB and FHWA.