
Top down cracking appears to be a common mode of HMA pavement distress in at least several states and countries. Traditionally, pavement cracking is thought to initiate at the bottom of the HMA layer where the tensile bending stresses are the greatest and then progress up to the surface (a bottom-up crack). Most traditional transfer functions used in mechanistic-empirical structural design are based on this concept. However, the late 1990s saw a substantial focus on a second mode of crack initiation and propagation: top-down cracking.