Possibilities to reduce pavement rehabilitation cost of a collision-free road investment using an LCCA design procedure

Abstract

In the past decades, many single carriageway roads in Sweden have been converted to collision-free roads as a cost-effective alternative to conventional motorways. Investigations have concluded that the road type has been successful in reducing the number of fatal accidents, despite increased operation and maintenance costs. In recent years, the focus has shifted to converting narrower roads, which are anticipated to further increase pavement rehabilitation cost but also complicate traffic management during road works. This paper first examines the consequences in terms of road agency and road user costs; second, the possibilities to influence future costs by design alternatives. A life cycle cost analysis was employed to study future costs. The analysis indicated significant increase in life cycle cost compared to a single carriageway road. The analysis of design alternatives also indicated that future agency and road user cost can be substantially improved by finding an optimal alternative.

Critical review and methodological issues in integrated life-cycle analysis on road networks

“… User costs and hidden social costs were generally addressed (60%), however, more emphasis was placed on agency-side costs of ownership and maintenance (75%). Nonetheless, user costs may be critical for future studies; recent work by Wennström and Karlsson (2016) attributed a majority of costs towards the road users as illustrated in Figure 3. Decisions to constrain the scope of analysed variable constructs to agencyside parameters may be attributed to a general lack of data at the various life-cycle stages of the asset under consideration.…”

“…Input variables, such as initial costs, operation and occupancy costs, maintenance and repair costs, social and hidden costs, externalities and incomes, analysis period, end-of-life costs and compensation for inflation, depreciation of money with time are fixed, based upon past studies and traditional LCCA approaches (Wennström and Karlsson, 2016) to address cost optimisation problems of road maintenance and pavement design. The need for construction of new roads or rehabilitation of an existing pavement structure forms the basis on which the objectives of a functional product 1 are developed and the scope and boundary of the project are established.…”

“…Percentile trade-off between cost-environment of road projects (adapted fromWennström and Karlsson (2016)) …”

Implementing life cycle cost analysis in road engineering: A critical review on methodological framework choices

“…Finally, when the pavement condition and structural capacity is too poor, with a high risk of structural failure, service life must be extended by applying rehabilitation treatments [55]. Rehabilitation has the highest cost because it involves the milling or demolishing of the existent road and the reconstruction of a new one [56]. Similar to the construction phase, the associated cost components for M&R activities may include materials, construction machinery or equipment, labour and transportation [3,57].…”

“…The residual value on the other hand can be determined in a simple fashion using Eq. 2 [17,51,53,56]:…”