Low Cost Roads

Low Cost Roads (1971) — UNESCO / Butterworths
Condition: Good — proudly roadworthy from Crappy Old Books.

Looking to pave the way to civilisation without paving over the budget? Welcome to Low Cost Roads (1971), UNESCO’s earnest, delightfully straight-faced field manual for building respectable highways out of optimism, gravel, and whatever the local quarry hasn’t already turned into someone’s front step. Issued in that glorious era when a clipboard, a contour map, and a determined civil engineer could move mountains (or at least put a camber on one), this book is the practical poetry of doing more with less—and then maintaining it with a shovel and a smile.

Inside you’ll find the full kit of road-building thrift: how to choose alignments that won’t slide off in the rainy season, why drainage is the cheapest miracle known to mankind, and which surface dressings keep traffic moving even when your bitumen travels second class. It’s part engineering handbook, part development pragmatism, all couched in a tone that gently implies you can, in fact, make a perfectly decent road with a roller that predates colour television.

Expect chapters on:

• Geometric design on a shoestring — curves, gradients, and sight distances for where “money is tight” and hills are not.

• Subgrade sorcery — turning questionable soils into obedient foundations (laterites, we see you).

• Gravel, macadam & surface dressings — from hand-broken stone to that satisfying “thunk” of a pneumatic roller.

• Drainage, the unsung hero — side drains, mitre drains, culverts and the gospel of keeping water somewhere else.

• Labour vs. machinery — cost comparisons from the age when “maintenance gang” meant people and not a software subscription.

• Axle loads & traffic counts — how to survive lorries that weren’t in the budget.

• Costing & phasing — spreadsheets before spreadsheets; tables that still make sense, pencils not included.

It’s earnest. It’s useful. And in our Good copy, it’s fully intact and ready to be consulted, admired, or brandished in meetings where someone suggests “just tarmac it” without a plan. Perfect for civil engineers, transport history nerds, planners, model railway megalomaniacs, or anyone who believes that a well-shaped side drain is a love letter to future you.

Buy it for the technical wisdom. Keep it for the charming confidence of a time when roads were designed, drained, and diligently maintained—and when “low cost” didn’t mean “low standards.” From Crappy Old Books, where the shoulders are firm, the gradients kind, and the prose slightly cambered for runoff.

Keep browsing: See more Academic books Other books by UNESCO