Cost Effective Preventive Pavement Maintenance

This synthesis will be of interest to highway agency executive management including administrative, budget, and finance personnel; pavement design, construction, and maintenance engineers; and maintenance operations personnel, including supervisors and maintenance crew leaders. This synthesis describes the state of the practice with respect to setting a coherent strategy of cost-effective preventive maintenance for extending pavement life. This report of the Transportation Research Board describes the practices of state, local, and provincial transportation agencies that are attempting to minimize the life-cycle costs of pavements and are identifying, during the design of the pavement rehabilitation, reconstruction, or construction projects, the future preventive maintenance treatments and the timing and funding for those treatments. It includes a review of domestic literature and a survey of current practices in North America. The appendices include a primer on pavement design and construction, the benefits of preventive maintenance of pavements, a summary of the questionnaire data collected, a simulation of pavement management strategies, and an example process to demonstrate the cost- effectiveness of preventive maintenance.