Integrating Local Street Maintenance Projects into a Performance-Based User-Oriented Project Evaluation Framework

Preserving local street infrastructure is a critical transportation priority for many jurisdictions across the country. However, there is an ongoing debate about how funding should be distributed between road maintenance and other transportation projects. Another cause for debate is the way roads are prioritized for repair. Robust methodologies have been developed to assist engineers and planners in identifying investment allocations that maximize pavement condition at the least cost to the system operator. Yet this approach fails to quantify the user benefits associated with system preservation for local streets. The authors' research translates pavement conditions into operational impacts and then integrates those impacts into a regional travel demand model to simulate user impacts from various levels of system maintenance. The authors' approach allows for the quantification of travel time, travel cost, air quality, collision, and other benefits previously not quantified for road maintenance projects, allowing for a consistent performance assessment of road maintenance investments with infrastructure expansion projects across modes. Furthermore, it allows the simulation of user responses – such as mode shifts, trip diversion, or trip cancelation – that might result as an effect of poor infrastructure condition. By breaking down silos between assessments of expansion and state of good repair (SGR) investments, this performance-based methodology may allow for more informed funding allocations for regional planning and a greater emphasis on delivering benefits to system customers: the motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians using the roadway infrastructure. This preliminary benefit-cost analysis of maintaining local streets in a state of good repair in the San Francisco Bay Area resulted in a low-to-moderate cost-effectiveness for these investments. These impacts were less positive than originally hypothesized because marginal vehicle operating cost reductions from better-maintained facilities were offset by a very slight mode shift that yielded adverse impacts for environmental, health, and safety measures. Furthermore, the current practice of repairing streets before severe degradation occurs in order to boost cost effectiveness for transit agencies was shown to impose increased vehicle operating costs for motorists traveling on degraded (and thus lower repair priority) streets under the constrained funding scenarios.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABC30 Performance Measurement.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Paterson, Liz
  • Vautin, David
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 94th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2015-1-11 to 2015-1-15
• Date: 2015

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 16p
• Monograph Title: TRB 94th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Benefit cost analysis; Evaluation and assessment; Financing; Highway maintenance; Performance measurement; Resource allocation; Travel demand
• Geographic Terms: San Francisco Bay Area
• Subject Areas: Finance; Highways; Maintenance and Preservation; Planning and Forecasting; I10: Economics and Administration; I60: Maintenance; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01556432
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 15-1206
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Mar 5 2015 5:48PM