Estimates are that for every $1 spent on preventative pavement maintenance, between $4 and $10 are saved on rehabilitation. This illustrates why, in today’s fiscally constrained environment, investment in maintenance and preservation is crucial. Traditional methods for estimating the benefits of preservation-related transportation projects rely on estimated or modeled reductions in travel time. Unfortunately, although preservation projects, such as placing new concrete or asphalt pavement, are critical to maintaining roadway infrastructure, many times these types of projects do not provide significant travel time reductions because the most efficient maintenance and preservation occur at points long before roads become completely unusable and even before any appreciable decline in performance is evident. This makes it difficult to both estimate and communicate the economic benefits from these types of investments. Therefore, the objectives of this research are to evaluate and analyze WSDOT’s current process for calculating the benefits of preservation projects and to develop better methods for measuring the benefits of highway preservation projects.
Principal Investigators:
Eric Jessup, School of Economic Sciences, WSU
Ken Casavant, School of Economic Sciences, WSU
Sponsor: WSDOT
WSDOT Project Manager: Doug Brodin
Scheduled completion: June 2021