Recommended Citation
Kemaw, Hanna, "The Price of Longevity - Empirical Evidence from Road Pavements" (2022). Lyles School of Civil Engineering Graduate Student Reports. Paper 3.
https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/civlgradreports/3
Date of this Version
12-2022
Disciplines
Civil Engineering
Abstract
The vast network of county, city and town roads, represent a big part of public assets in most states and often account for a significant share of the public spending on roads. This spending on local road infrastructure help to build, operate, and preserve such infrastructure and therefore provide critical accessibility and mobility to the residents of counties, towns and cities. With the ever-growing volumes of personal and commercial traffic at local roads, the task of maintaining satisfactory levels of service at local roads has become more challenging, and this issue is exacerbated by limited resources, asset aging, and increasing public expectations of local road levels of service. Motivated by federal legislation, in recent years, highway agencies in the United States are increasingly turning to asset management systems to help develop objective investment decisions for maintaining their road infrastructure. However, at most agencies, asset management systems are at a nascent stage of development, and several of the key elements are missing. This report addresses a key element of asset management, namely: assessment of tradeoffs across treatment types based on treatment performance and costs. The report establishes the relationships between pavement maintenance expenditures and performance (added longevity), and provides information that can be used to evaluate whether the relationship pattern differs across the two pavement types: flexible (asphaltic concrete) and rigid (PCC) pavements.