Concreting the UK

Generali

cells wrote: »

Good guess. Or rather im more interested in the method than the actual number.

some thoughts. The road network capacity would probably be irrelevant as you can drive on the concrete your building

I did think about that but I couldn't be bothered to exponentially increase the capacity of the roads.

Note that I don;t allow for any preparations so we are literally pouring 6" of concrete over the UK. I doubt that a road of that standard would be up to taking thousands of multi-tonne lorries every day. Maybe it could take one, once.

cells

zagubov wrote: »

We worked out on another thread that if we wanted to have american style houses and gardens roads parking area etc. at our population density, we'd be about 30-35% built up, about the same as Malta.

A fairly leafy detached house would be about a quarter of an acre.

if you wanted to build 10 milliom such homes it would take up 2.5 million acres or 4.1% of the UK land. But if course about 90% of that 4.1% would be green gardens front sides and rear.

but anyway how long wpuld it take to concrete over the UK if we really wanted to do so? Have a guess

ukcarper

Some things to consider, are you going to do preparatory work or just lay concrete you say assume UK is flat which it isn't so how are you going to lay concrete on steeper slopes. What about areas of marsh and bog what foundations are you going to use there.

cells

Generali wrote: »

I did think about that but I couldn't be bothered to exponentially increase the capacity of the roads.

Note that I don;t allow for any preparations so we are literally pouring 6" of concrete over the UK. I doubt that a road of that standard would be up to taking thousands of multi-tonne lorries every day. Maybe it could take one, once.

No we want to build a proper road that can take vehicles. It means digging down about 10-12 inches and building up a fairly stable road.

We can ignore what we would do with that soil (we would have nowhere to put it)as everywhere will be cconcrete. Lets pretend the local tips can take it and it creates a new hill that we will concrete over later

cells

ukcarper wrote: »

Some things to consider, are you going to do preparatory work or just lay concrete you say assume UK is flat which it isn't so how are you going to lay concrete on steeper slopes. What about areas of marsh and bog what foundations are you going to use there.

Discount all that away, not really interested in accuracy to the nearest month more like to the nearest order of magnitude

So roughly flat above sea level needs to be a proper road

Jonbvn

Generali wrote: »

Well the UK, according to Google, is 243,000 sq km. They say 5% of the country is already under concrete so similar leaving 95% of that or about 231,000 km^2 to go.

I we assume that we want to concrete this to a depth of 15cm we'd need 34,625 km^3 or 34,625,000,000,000 m^3.

Again according to Google, a concrete truck as a capacity of 6.1 m^2 so we would require about 5,675,000,000,000 to carry all that concrete.

The M25 has had a maximum of 196,000 vehicles on it in a day according to Google. If we assume the UK's road network has the capacity of 1,000 M25s (a wild stab in the dark quite frankly) then it would take 28,960 days to move that concrete if we also assume that all road movements are restricted to moving concrete and nobody has to travel to get to the site of the concrete. That is 80 years.

So there we go. I can state definitively that it would take 80 years to concrete over the rest of the UK to a depth of 15cm.

:P

There is a problem Gen.

The design life of concrete is 50 years according to the latest Eurocode requirements. This means we would have to start repairing and/or replacing some of the concrete before we had finished all of it. Seems a bit "Easter Island" to me

Jonbvn

cells wrote: »

No we want to build a proper road that can take vehicles. It means digging down about 10-12 inches and building up a fairly stable road.

We can ignore what we would do with that soil (we would have nowhere to put it)as everywhere will be concrete. Lets pretend the local tips can take it and it creates a new hill that we will concrete over later

As a civil engineer, I would say 10-12 inches is generally too little. I would expect around 20 inches.

cells

Jonbvn wrote: »

As a civil engineer, I would say 10-12 inches is generally too little. I would expect around 20 inches.

Everywhere is road which means each sqm gets very little use.

So discount away finite life/repairs needed and we can do 12-15inch if you like

cells

Anyway I'm going to post my guess.
Having recently built a road at a cost not much below £100/sqm

I figure if we dedicated the entire UK military budget of 2% of GDP and had 2% of the entire workforce (about 600,000 people working continuously on the project) it would take about 750 years to do.

60 milliom acres 4,000 sqm an acre, £100/sqm. £1.6T GDP = ~750 years


So even if we wanted to concrete over the entire UK its a mammoth task that would take 600,000 people ~750 years to achieve.

Was a little surprising I'd probably have guessed 75 years or less before thinking it through and would no't have imagined it would have taken so many people

Generali

Here's a thought that I can't answer because I'm on the train. How would the concrete get to the UK? Is/could the UK be self-sufficient. If not, what would be the capacity of ports to bring in the raw materials.

Another one. How does the answer change if we tarmacked over the UK or turned the UK into some nice decking?