This technology likely has not been adopted due to difficulty and expense of manufacturing a robust machine and lack of marketing. How many people even knew this solution existed? What is the measurable benefit to paving roads this way? How much does the machine cost vs traditional roller method? All of this work is expensive and there isn't a guarantee of success. While the hypothesis seems reasonable you have to do all the math/science to figure out if this truly is cost effective. Ideas are great, execution is hard.
This doesn’t really work for government contractors because the government isn’t even remotely a rational buyer. The government doesn’t generally have the latitude to pick the best value - they are constrained by procedural rules. For example, in the US, 5% of federal small contractor spending must go to minority-owned businesses, regardless of their relative quality. Generally there is a fixed bidding procedure that doesn’t allow for judgements about the quality of the final product. Where the government isn’t constrained by procedural rules, politics will come before rational spending. This argument only really works for privately owned and operated roads that have rational incentives.
So, suffice to say, there is little real competition because most new competitors get literally threatened for their lives if they try to compete.
Construction companies routinely don't build each layer of road up to code. Thus potholes appear much sooner than they should.
If it isn't corruption, then how are they getting away with it?
This sounds great in theory but it doesn't work this way, at least in the private sector. Recently, I had to contract out a 100k pavement parking lot job for the first time for property management. I talked to about 10 different contracting firms, some being indepedent firms - and some firms directly employed by the asphalt plant.
Its very hard to tell what you are going to get if you haven't worked with that contractor before. Sure, everything is on a contract with specific line items that specifies each piece of work done (e.g. uproot asphalt where concrete meets it to pave evenly, compact a 2.5" to 2" using a specific grade mix [there's about 3-10 different mixes]), you can read contractor reviews online, but really how are YOU specifically going to measure the results? How do you know your contractor is really going to be doing a better job than another competitor?
What it all boiled down for me in selecting the vendor is whether or not they actually specified every concern I had regarding the parking lot job. Did they actually care about asking the right questions, did they put every concern I had in writing under the contract? Was the price reasonable? Did this person seem knowledgeable based on past experience? Honestly this is what it all boils down to most of the time in contractual-based jobs when selecting a contractor that is not the lowest bid job.
Public jobs are going to be slightly different, but to the extent the same, depending mostly on the city's municipality. I can't speak from experience here, but it would make much more sense for a government entity to employ stricter regulations on major road arteries (3-4 lane roads) using equipment such as the AMIR. But this is when you have to deal with government bureaucracy, and some contracting firms are not going to look to highly on the need to invest in more expensive equipment and reduce the potential number of jobs they have in the future (since there would be less maintenance needed). Not only that, but also the infrastructure in housing an AMIR along with other cost such as maintenance / training could become costly for the contracting firm.
Minor road arteries / minor jobs (1 or 2 lane roadways) probably not so much since its traditional rollers are extremely portable, have high availability (both for renting, contractors familiar with / used the equipment, etc) and require smaller more versatile machines and can be loaded on one trailer.
In addition, every city municipality is different. Your rural city in the middle of nowhere is not going to really care about using AMIR.
I don't know how much the AMIR cost, but for it to be adopted for widespread use, it would have to have the following:
1. Compact and portability for small and large jobs alike
2. Justified cost for short-term profitability for contractors
3. Enforcement by government and regulations to private industries to use such technology
And there's a snarky comment on page 163 about companies that have to fix roads after ripping them up ("breaking"): if they do condescend to cart anything away it is generally the metal, which they think will come in nicely for the repairs of the trench during their liability for such repairs.
TL/DR: your town engineer just needs to specify the right stuff in the contract, and the road paving companies will just have to adapt.
If you think about it, the same thing holds true for any large, bespoke contract. What you get at the end depends in part on the supervision you put in.