Routine Highway Maintenance: The Relationship Between Cost and Condition

When transportation agencies prepare a design for new highway construction or major improvements to existing highways, the life-cycle, agency, and user costs are considered in project design decisions. However, when highway projects are completed, maintenance budgets are rarely adjusted to accommodate the routine maintenance of new lane miles. Maintenance budgets thus often do not keep pace. Even if budgets per lane mile remain relatively constant, the number of vehicle miles traveled per highway mile increases. The growing disparity between maintenance budgets and maintenance requirements leads to difficult choices for maintenance priorities. Concerns about safety and mobility tend to trump preservation of capital investment. This paper presents a study of the relationship between maintenance cost and performance. Using data from the state of Wisconsin and regression tree analysis, the study identified physical, environmental, operational, and socioeconomic parameters that influence maintenance costs for asphalt and concrete pavements, shoulders, litter pickup, vegetation control, and ditches. Equations were determined for estimating the annual cost for maintenance of state and interstate highways in jurisdictions responsible for the upkeep of 100 to 900 lane miles.

• Record URL:
  http://www.ctre.iastate.edu/pubs/midcon2007/AdamsRoutine.pdf
• 
• Corporate Authors:

  Iowa State University, Ames

  Institute for Transportation
  Ames, IA  United States  50010-8664
• Authors:
  • Adams, Teresa M
  • Juni, Emil
  • Kannan, Kamal
  • Sokolowski, David
• Conference:
  • 2007 Mid-Continent Transportation Research Symposium
  • Location: Ames IA, United States
  • Date: 2007-8-16 to 2007-8-17
• Publication Date: 2007

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Web
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 13p
• Monograph Title: Proceedings of the 2007 Mid-Continent Transportation Research Symposium

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Budgeting; Design; Highway maintenance; Life cycle costing; Mobility; Safety; Transportation departments
• Uncontrolled Terms: Lane miles; Maintenance costs; Parameters; User costs
• Geographic Terms: Wisconsin
• Subject Areas: Design; Finance; Highways; Maintenance and Preservation; Planning and Forecasting; Safety and Human Factors; I10: Economics and Administration; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01076935
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Sep 26 2007 8:06AM