Maximizing Customer Benefits as the Ultimate Goal of Pavement Management

Maximizing customer benefits and satisfaction is a goal toward which any service or product provider, including pavement engineers, should strive. In order to do this, the customers for pavements must be clearly recognized and the measures to be used for determining their benefits clearly identified. This paper defines the key sets of pavement customers in relation to the different classes of pavements, including roads, off-road areas, airfields and railbeds. It then addresses the means by which customers can be served in a broad sense by effective pavement management. Next, measures of customer benefits are identified, ranging from ride quality to surface distress, structural adequacy, surface friction, surface drainage, noise, user delays and life-cycle cost-effectiveness. As well, the degree of importance for different customer-measure combinations is suggested. A brief description of the technologies available for characterizing the measures is provided, together with some examples. Finally, the results of a simple pilot study to determine the relative value of the measures of road user customer benefits are described. These indicate that on a scale of 0 to 100, ride quality would contribute about 25% to overall customer benefit, surface distress nearly 20% and all the other measures between about 5 and 10% each.

• Availability:
  • Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://worldcat.org/isbn/0971174016
• Corporate Authors:

  University of Washington, Seattle

  Engineering Professional Programs, 10303 Meridian Avenue North #301
  Seattle, WA  United States  98133-9483
• Authors:
  • Haas, Ralph
  • Hudson, W Ronald
  • Tighe, Susan Louise
• Conference:
  • Fifth International Conference on Managing Pavements
  • Location: Seattle Washington, United States
  • Date: 2001-8-11 to 2001-8-14
• Publication Date: 2001-8

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: CD-ROM
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 14p
• Monograph Title: Fifth International Conference on Managing Pavements, August 11-14, 2001, Seattle, Washington. Conference Proceedings

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Benefits; Cost effectiveness; Customer satisfaction; Life cycle costing; Noise; Pavement distress; Pavement management systems; Pavements; Ride quality; Surface drainage
• Subject Areas: Design; Environment; Finance; Highways; Pavements; I22: Design of Pavements, Railways and Guideways; I23: Properties of Road Surfaces;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01037825
• Record Type: Publication
• ISBN: 0971174016
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Dec 4 2006 9:11AM