No abstract

Some important modern problems of the transport engineering, which occur in the newly built and modernised road objects, have been indicated in the work. A discussion was conducted regarding the methods of assessing the stability of slopes of the road embankments, the obtained stability margins and the interpretation of obtained results in the specific cases of foundations of the road earth structures. Presented observations result from analysing the stability assessments of slopes of the road embankments, which was conducted on many communication objects, characterised by high variability of foundation conditions.

Road embankments, especially their slopes’ surfaces, must fulfil all the requirements concerning the exploitation criteria after the completion of construction works. This is very important while constructing or modernizing the embankments, based on the substrate including low-strength soils as well as in simple ground conditions (most convenient). The last dozen or so years of intensive construction of transport infrastructure have shown how big is the problem of ensuring the required volumes of qualified soil material for the construction of road embankments or the modernization of railway embankments. The depleting deposits of natural and easily accessible soils for the construction of embankments result in the need to use anthropogenic soils, for example, in the form of aggregates from the recycling of construction waste and other locally available waste materials, usually in the form of slag and ashes from the combined heat and power plants. In such cases, there’s a need to treat transportation earth structures individually in the scope of designing and quality control, because there are no applicable standard provisions in this scope.This work indicates some of these important contemporary problems of transport engineering, occurring in newly built and modernized road objects, such as the stability of road embankments based on a low-strength substrate, use of anthropogenic soils and materials originating from the recycling of concrete surfaces for the construction of road embankments.