Poor haul road quality is driving up your tyre budget. Here’s why.

Tyres wear out naturally over time. That’s expected. What often shortens their life is heat build up.

“Road quality has a direct influence on how much heat a tyre generates,” explains Julian Musgrave, Head of Business Development Australia at Bind-X.

“The smoother the road, the less the tyre flexes, and the cooler it runs.”

Every time a haul truck travels over corrugations, potholes or uneven surfaces, the tyre deforms under load. That movement generates heat within the internal structure of the tyre.

Individually, those movements may be small. But across thousands of haul hours, the effect becomes significant.

Heat build-up also creates safety risks. Tyre overheating events can trigger extensive site response procedures, including exclusion zones, extended down time, cooling activities and inspections before equipment can return to service.

For that reason, tyre temperature is closely monitored across many operations.

Tyres are one of the easiest, yet most overlooked, places to see the cost of poor road quality. But they aren’t the only place it shows up. The same road conditions that shorten tyre life also increase dust, maintenance, water consumption, equipment wear and cycle times.

The financial impact of shortened tyre life is substantial. Julian points to one mining operation that focused heavily on haul road quality and road design. Before improving their road surfaces, their tyres lasted around 4,000 operating hours. After creating smoother running conditions and better road designs, tyre life increased to approximately 5,500 hours.

The exact numbers will vary from site to site, but the principle remains the same. Tyres are expensive and so is the maintenance to look after the fleet.

A haul truck tyre can cost $45,000 before freight and logistics are factored in, depending on the truck model and size. “A haul truck can easily be carrying a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of tyres underneath it,” explains Julian, who has worked in road stabilisation and dust control for nearly a decade.

“Tyres are often viewed as a necessary fleet maintenance cost. In reality, a lot of that cost is determined by the quality of the roads those trucks operate on every day,” he says.

Not all sections of haul road cause the same level of stress. Julian explains that corners can be problem areas to maintain because trucks continually push material sideways when they turn. Over time, this creates rutting, channel formation and surface deformation, increasing the internal stresses on the tyres.

Autonomous fleets can amplify this effect. While autonomous trucks vary their path slightly on straight sections, they tend to follow very similar lines through corners. The same sections of road receive repeated loading, which accelerates wear in concentrated areas.

The result is a surface that becomes progressively rougher and more difficult to maintain. Those localised defects might seem minor at first, but they create exactly the conditions that increase tyre flex, add additional abrasive material onto the road surface, generate heat, and shorten tyre life.

In many cases, road surface deterioration begins with the loss of fines. A haul road relies on a mix of large aggregate, smaller aggregate and fine particles. The fines fill the gaps between larger particles and help lock the structure together. When roads become too dry, those fines are gradually lost as dust.

As the fines disappear, the larger particles begin moving against each other. The road surface becomes less stable, and defects start to develop.

This is when: potholes appear → corrugations form → loose material accumulates. And that rougher, looser surface creates more tyre heat and more tyre wear.

Most people notice the symptoms. Fewer people connect the root cause back to the fines that have already left the road.

As Julian puts it: dust is some of your hard-won profits blowing away.

Most operations respond to deteriorating roads the same way: The grader smooths the surface → the water cart follows behind → the road looks good again.

But the challenge is that appearance and structure are not the same thing. 

“Are you restoring the shape of the road? Or are you restoring the integrity of the road?” he asks. Without addressing the underlying stability of the surface, the same deterioration process often returns within hours or days.

Water management creates a similar challenge. Roads perform best within a relatively narrow moisture range. Too little moisture and fines are lost as dust. Too much moisture and the road can soften, wash out fines and lose structural integrity. Maintaining that balance across an entire haul road network 24/7 is difficult, particularly when a small number of water carts are responsible for servicing a large fleet.

The result is a cycle of watering, grading, deterioration and rework that many operations struggle to escape.

The best solution is stabilisation. Whether that’s achieved through mechanical stabilisation, lignins, polymers, salts, bitumen-based products or biological stabilisers, the objective is the same: preserve the integrity of the road structure for longer.

A stable road retains fines, resists deformation and maintains a smoother running surface under traffic. Once that happens, many of the secondary benefits follow naturally:

• Tyres run cooler
• Dust generation decreases
• Water demand falls
• Maintenance intervals extend
• Equipment experiences less vibration and wear
• Visibility and safety improve
• Cycle times become more consistent

As Julian explains, “The road remains in good condition for longer, it reduces the need for constant intervention, and lowers the damage being done to the equipment using it.”

As we’ve shown, addressing road stability and surface smoothness on your haul roads can have a big impact on tyre costs.

When you’re evaluating stabilisation options, look beyond the initial application and consider the full life cycle of the product.”

Consider things like water use, maintenance demands, reapplication frequency, environmental impact, and rehabilitation requirements, as these all influence long-term value.

Carbon footprint is increasingly important as well. In their reporting, many operations are beginning to assess the upstream footprint associated with the products they use. As Julian notes, decisions made today should be made with the next five-to-ten years in mind, not just the next five-to-ten months.

Many mines now find that biological dust control options like Terrabind address all of these factors and improve road stability.

They treat road quality as both a maintenance issue and an operational performance issue to unlock savings and benefits across their operation.