The interaction between road traffic safety and the condition of sewers laid under roads

The main objective of this paper is to show how the service condition of the underground pipeline infrastructure, especially sewage systems, may contribute to road surface failures such as subsidence, bulging and particularly collapse. The analysis was based on CCTV surveys conducted in Poland to investigate the causes of more than a hundred road surface collapse incidents.The method proposed in this paper enables us to determine the risk of road surface collapse as the product of the category of probability of road collapse caused by damaged sewer pipelines and the weighted arithmetic mean category of their consequences.The key conclusions highlight the causes of road collapse incidents, the scale of the hazards, and the benefits resulting from the application of the proposed method to prioritize roads according to the road collapse risk.