Abstract
While for years most American State Highway Agencies (SHAs) have performed Road User Cost (RUC) calculations, no uniformity from state to state has been established. There is scant research available that documents the testing and validation of existing RUC calculation methods for highway rehabilitation projects. Especially scarce are studies addressing the unique problem of accurately calculating RUC in the event of lane closures. This research addresses this problem by describing and comparing two methods of making such calculations: A manual method developed by the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI), and adopted by many other state agencies, such as the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT), and a commercial software package.
Highlights
The use of roads, especially the highway, has a variety of range of impacts on sustainable issues, including CO2 emissions
Even less formalized is the calculation of road user cost (RUC) when a lane must be closed for construction, even though most rehabilitation projects require such lane closures [3,4]
Some state departments of transportation apply the same method as Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) except that the value of time (VOT) is multiplied by a factor that causes the result to better satisfy the needs of that agency
Summary
The use of roads, especially the highway, has a variety of range of impacts on sustainable issues, including CO2 emissions. To calculate RUC, the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) uses “Techniques for Manually Estimating Road User Costs Associated with Construction Projects.”. The calculated user costs can be used as the basis for liquidated damages for milestone completions of each phase or selected phases of the project This approach is most applicable to those projects with severe capacity restrictions during construction where phase completion time is critical. Each day the final improved facility is delayed is another day that users are unable to realize travel time savings and other benefits from the additional roadway capacity This approach is a combination of the two described above and is applicable to projects where the final improvements do not result in an increase in capacity, i.e., rehabilitation projects. The comparisons can demonstrate how the RUC calculation can contribute to the economic issue by calculating the opportunity cost from the analysis of the field data using a specific code manual and software package
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