Enhanced maintenance management procedures for infrastructure damaged by motor vehicle crashes
Abstract
There are approximately 4,000 instances annually where state property located along Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) maintained right-of-way needs to be replaced or repaired due to motor vehicle crashes. The median cost of invoices to responsible parties $419. INDOT incurs significant financial losses from state property damage that is not reimbursed directly by the responsible driver or when invoice costs do not reflect the fully-loaded cost of the repair. This study's objective is to identify enhanced management procedures to decrease the financial burden of the state by identifying practices supporting the following four goals: increasing the amount invoiced and the percent collected, associating more crash reports to damage, decreasing the entire process time, and invoicing fully-loaded repair costs. To implement the best practices found in other agencies, this study administered two sets of surveys to state highway agencies in the United States. After comparing INDOT's process with those of peer states, this study recommends that the recovery process should begin with assignment, by law enforcement, of a tag to each damage instance. On the bases of assigned tags, maintenance crews proceed with the processing of crash damage documentation forms. An overhead and administration fee should be recorded in the repair costs to recover labor used to process the repair documents. This study also recommends that the repair invoice should be preceded with a notification letter to the driver and/or insurance company. The study also establishes appropriate performance measures that could be used to evaluate the effectiveness of the process. Past invoicing challenges show that these components are expected to increase the frequency of reimbursement of repair costs.
Degree
M.S.C.E.
Advisors
Bullock, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Management|Civil engineering
Off-Campus Purdue Users:
To access this dissertation, please log in to our
proxy server.