Inspection of roadway bridges: a comparison at the European level

The management of roadway bridges necessitates periodic and exceptional inspection activities which may entail maintenance works or cause traffic disruption depending on the structural health state. These inspections can be visual, when they are based on the expert judgement of inspectors, they can be supported by destructive (DT) or non-destructive (NDT) tests or imply the use of permanent monitoring systems. Visual inspections can be performed at several levels of detail: from rapid ones (such as those carried out using a moving vehicle) to very detailed ones (when all the elements of the structure are analyzed). Inspection activities for roadway bridges are not regulated at European level and each country adopts its own rules. Besides, within the same country, inspection practices may differ according to the internal guidelines of each concessionaire. The aim of this paper is to provide a comparative analysis on the inspection rules adopted for roadway bridges in eight European countries: Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Italy, Norway, Slovakia, Spain, United Kingdom. The main existing documents, which include technical codes, guidelines and best practices, used to plan and execute inspections, have been identified and analyzed for each country. The documents are compared in terms of several technical aspects spanning from frequency and type of inspections, required level of qualification of inspectors, protocols to store inspection results, and inspected elements.