Practical Approach for Pavement Treatment Decisions for Local Agencies

Abstract

Most local agencies such as counties and small cities continuously express difficulties in making technically and financially defensible decisions on their pavement infrastructure maintenance and rehabilitation. Unlike pavement systems managed by state highway agencies, the total lane-miles of many local pavements are significantly short and they are managed by a limited number of staff who typically have multiple responsibilities. Most local agencies also do not have historical pavement performance data and the lack of a systematic decision making framework exacerbates the problem. A structured framework and an easily accessible decision support tool that reflects their local requirements, practices and operational conditions would greatly assist them in making consistent and defensible decisions. This study fills this gap by developing a systematic pavement treatment selection framework and a spreadsheet based tool for local agencies. It is expected that the proposed framework will significantly help local agencies to improve their pavement asset management practices at the project level.

Municipal street maintenance challenges and management practices in Sweden

“…In another study, it was found that traffic volume, maintenance history and structural data are important factors in building PMS among Colorado local agencies (Hafez et al, 2019). In Iowa State, US, collection of pavement distress data is lacking in 70% (of 74 respondents) of the local agencies, and therefore subjective maintenance practice prevails (Abdelaty et al, 2017).…”