Concrete pavement was used for the main portions of the US 17 realignment. The roadway surface consists of 12-inch plain cement concrete pavement with doweled transverse and longitudinal joints. The contractor, AJAX, utilized a concrete paving crew and slip form paver based out of their Michigan operations center to pave the concrete roadway. The entire slip form paving operation took only two weeks to lay 46,600 square yards. To accommodate this amount of concrete production, AJAX constructed an off-site portable concrete batch plant to produce a continuous and consistent concrete mix for the primary phase of the project.
The construction cost of this project was approximately $14.5 million. Concrete pavement was chosen due to high volumes of vehicles (16,600 AADT) and large percentage (24.5%) of truck traffic using this route and due to the amount of maintenance that previously was required due to the turning and stopping movements of those heavy vehicles. This project won Roads and Bridges magazine’s #10 spot for the best road projects in North America, (October 2018 Edition).