Highway Maintenance Costs Research Articles

Statistical Analysis of Minor Highway Maintenance Costs

Statistical Analysis of Minor Highway Maintenance Costs

AHP-DEMATEL Based Research on the Influencing Factors of the Daily Maintenance Costs of China's National and Provincial Trunk Highways

Highway maintenance is equally crucial across borders; this paper first conducts statistics and case study research on daily federal and provincial highway maintenance costs in China's principal influencing factors. Finally, it looks at those results with the tools of AHP-DEMAT. Yet, the overall degree of influence of each factor of influence is collected to classify the significant influence factors. The results found that: the main factors influencing the daily maintenance costs of national and provincial trunk highways are: highway grade, traffic flow, service life, structure type, topography, pavement thickness, and pavement width; the influence of climate factors on costs can be adequately considered when formulating standards for daily maintenance costs for provinces/regions with a broad geographic range.

Robust stochastic frontier analysis: a Student\u2019s t-half normal model with application to highway maintenance costs in England

The presence of outliers in the data has implications for stochastic frontier analysis, and indeed any performance analysis methodology, because they may lead to imprecise parameter estimates and, crucially, lead to an exaggerated spread of efficiency predictions. In this paper we replace the normal distribution for the noise term in the standard stochastic frontier model with a Student’s t distribution, which generalises the normal distribution by adding a shape parameter governing the degree of kurtosis. This has the advantages of introducing flexibility in the heaviness of the tails, which can be determined by the data, as well as containing the normal distribution as a limiting case, and we outline how to test against the standard model. Monte Carlo simulation results for the maximum simulated likelihood estimator confirm that the model recovers appropriate frontier and distributional parameter estimates under various values of the true shape parameter. The simulation results also indicate the influence of a phenomenon we term ‘wrong kurtosis’ in the case of small samples, which is analogous to the issue of ‘wrong skewness’ previously identified in the literature. We apply a Student’s t-half normal cost frontier to data for highways authorities in England, and this formulation is found to be preferred by statistical testing to the comparator normal-half normal cost frontier model. The model yields a significantly narrower range of efficiency predictions, which are non-monotonic at the tails of the residual distribution.

Impacts of pavement deterioration and maintenance cost on Pareto-efficient contracts for highway franchising

In a build-operate-transfer (BOT) highway project, pavement roughness progression generally has a direct impact on the highway maintenance cost and user costs. Given two common rehabilitation strategies, this study respectively investigates the optimally designed highway capacity and tolls of multi-type vehicles in Pareto-efficient contracts. Under supplementary conditions, it proves that the optimal toll revenue could fully cover the highway construction and maintenance cost in these contracts, no matter with or without the regulated traffic composition. Further extensions are made to evaluate and identify properties of the highway v/c ratio, rehabilitation period or critical roughness under the two rehabilitation strategies, respectively.

The Feasibility of a Land Ferry System to Reduce Highway Maintenance Cost and Associated Externalities.

This study provides an economic evaluation for a Land Ferry, which is a rail system capable of carrying trucks and all other types of vehicles, passengers, and cargo. The Land Ferry system involves a sliding loading system to roll heavy loads onto a flatbed; as a result, loading and unloading of all vehicles and cargo could be accomplished simultaneously. The evaluation for this system included (1) the design of a new track alignment over which the Land Ferry system would run, (2) evaluation of various sources of power, (3) estimation of how many local jobs the Land Ferry would generate, and (4) a benefit-cost analysis. It was estimated that the Land Ferry would create over 45,788 temporary jobs in Nevada during the three-year construction period and 318 permanent jobs during operation. The majority of the benefits were attributed to savings in travel time ($356.4 M), vehicle operating costs ($1000.4 M), reduction of accidents ($544.6 M), and pavement maintenance ($503.2 M). These benefits would be a consequence of the shift of trucks from the highway, thus resulting in higher speeds, decrease fuel consumption, and decrease vehicle maintenance costs. The overall benefit-cost ratio of 1.7 implies a cost-effective project.

The Effect of Federal Davis-Bacon and Disadvantaged Business Enterprise Regulations on Highway Maintenance Costs

The author compares winning bids on state and federal highway maintenance projects in Colorado between 2000 and 2011 to determine whether federal prevailing wage and disadvantaged business enterprise regulations are associated with increased construction costs. The effect of the Davis-Bacon Act is evaluated when average wage rates prevail for almost all workers involved in highway maintenance for most of the period of the study. The federal minimum for work completed by disadvantaged businesses is 10%. The goal for Colorado exceeds this minimum by two to three percentage points. Summary data indicate that federal projects are more expensive than state projects, but projects funded by the federal government are also larger and more complex. Regression results indicate that, with controls for project size and complexity, no statistically significant difference is found in the cost of federal and state projects. Results also indicate that federal regulations are not associated with reduced bid competition, an important determinant of project cost.

Budgeting Performance-Based Winter Maintenance: Snow Influence on Highway Maintenance Cost

Swedish contracting of winter maintenance is combined with weather-regulated payment since the beginning of the 1990’s. It reduces the weather risk for the contractor and has helped performance-based specifications to find acceptance. The performance-based approach was introduced to save costs and create incentives for innovation. Theory and practice are often unconnected since the mathematical links are lacking behind the political rhetoric around performance-based contracting. This study attempts to bridge some of the gap between theory and practice by linking a climate factor, snow, to highway maintenance costs. To handle the complexity of weather, an iterative process was assumed necessary, with simplification as a first step. An answer was achieved to the two research questions: which stations correlated best with costs and what the winter maintenance cost would be, given the snowfall at these stations. Once having achieved this answer under simplified circumstances (one weather parameter, one region, few observations, linear relationship), the assumptions were relaxed, one after the other, in second and third iterations, to increase the generalizeability of the method and the results. Maintenance cost and weather data of Washington state were used. The method can be used anywhere where the actual costs of the maintenance are known. In countries and regions with privatized highway maintenance, like in Sweden, British Columbia, Alberta, and Ontario, the actual costs are not public. The lessons learned from this study may therefore be of particular interest to such privatized systems. The study supports that the Swedish road weather information system stations are in the right spots and proposes snowfall to weather regulate the payment to the contractor.

Closure to “Trade-offs between Initial and Maintenance Costs of Highways in Cross-Slopes” by Manoj K. Jha and Paul Schonfeld

Closure to “Trade-offs between Initial and Maintenance Costs of Highways in Cross-Slopes” by Manoj K. Jha and Paul Schonfeld

Discussion of “Trade-Offs between Initial and Maintenance Costs of Highways in Cross-Slopes” by Manoj K. Jha and Paul Schonfeld

Jha and Schonfeld’s paper addresses a critical “missing link” between infrastructure management systems and initial design/ construction decisions for a project. Specifically, the authors present a method to optimize highway alignment using trade-offs between initial and maintenance costs, focusing on overall lifecycle cost. They cite statistics to show that maintenance costs are significant over the life cycle of a project and argue that managers and engineers should make more extensive use of life-cycle cost analysis in the initial stages of a project. Their work highlights the difficulty in defining and quantifying maintenance costs for geotechnical infrastructure. We wholeheartedly agree with the authors that making truly effective decisions during design requires consideration of longterm costs, including maintenance costs. In this context, the authors have made a significant contribution by developing an optimization scheme to minimize life-cycle costs for transportation earthworks. We hope that their article will stimulate continued work on this important problem. In addition, we would like to raise several issues regarding the model and the problem in general to contribute to the discussion. First, the authors never define the activities they are including as “maintenance costs.” Terms such as “maintenance,” “repair,” and “rehabilitation” are used loosely in much of the infrastructure management literature. The lack of standard definition of the terms, in addition to the difficulty in tracking many of the costs that could be included, contributes to the difficulty in estimating life-cycle costs and creates confusion in the ongoing dialogue. We believe the paper will be more valuable as an archival record if the authors define the terms as used in their work. We concur that there is a severe lack of data available on these costs with regard to highway embankments and slopes, and we applaud the authors for developing a model for use in estimating these costs. Unfortunately, since it is difficult at present to evaluate the accuracy of the model, we simultaneously hope that transportation agencies will begin to collect and analyze such data so that the model proposed by the authors can be more rigorously evaluated and improved based on real data.

Trade-offs Between Initial and Maintenance Costs of Highways in Cross-Slopes

Highway maintainability is a significant issue, which should be considered in the planning stages of a highway development process. A number of infrastructure models such as highway maintenance management systems, bridge management systems, and pavement management systems have been developed to predict future maintenance expenditures. However, these models only predict maintenance costs after a highway is built, and do not provide the flexibility of exploring various alternatives in the planning stages. In this work formulations for initial and maintenance costs have been developed based on the design variables which can be chosen to minimize these costs, focusing on the sideslopes in cut and fill sections. Maintenance cost has been represented as a function of sideslope width of highway cross section and annual average daily traffic. Sideslope is represented as a function of soil type. The proposed formulations are used in a highway design optimization model to optimize highway alignments. An example is presented to investigate the sensitivities of maintenance cost and soil characteristics in selecting alignments, using a real geographic database from Maryland. The results indicate that maintenance cost and soil characteristics are important considerations in alignment optimization.

Incorporating environmental factors into a highway maintenance cost model

As infrastructure ages, the maintenance cost of highways is becoming a major international concern that hitherto has been overlooked by public sector researchers. This paper begins to fill this gap by focusing on the nature and extent of the impact of environmental cost drivers on costs of highway maintenance. By linking a cost driver framework with engineering theory, and using geographic information systems methodology, it has been possible to demonstrate that the physical geological environment has a significant effect on the cost of highway maintenance activity. In addition to advancing highway maintenance cost behaviour understanding, the research illustrates that to gain new insights, researchers must be prepared to base causality enquiries on theoretical foundations advanced by other disciplines and to work with data and methods of analysis which are appropriate to each situation. From a strategic cost management perspective, this study elevates environmental factors in importance as major drivers of cost and in particular, highlights their related interaction with management strategy and policy. The paper discusses aspects of the cost driver framework and application to planning and control accountability, describes dynamic inter-relationships between activity-based costing and activity-based management and suggests directions for further research.

Modeling Incremental Pavement Deterioration by Integrating Pavement and Intermodal Management System Data Bases

The U.S. Congress mandated the development of six transportation management systems with the passage of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991. Each of these management systems provides transportation planners with an inventory of transportation facilities and associated performance data that can be used to relate the performance of the facility. Toward the end of achieving better transportation planning, the management systems can be further integrated to yield a powerful transportation planning tool that can be used to analyze and quantify the pavement needs of intermodal facilities. Pavement designers can use this tool for traffic forecasting to allow more representative pavement designs. Transportation planners can also use this tool to predict the results of changes in shipping practices before they occur. The described procedure greatly enhances the transportation planning process by allowing the process to be more proactive rather than reactive. Modal shifts in freight traffic can result in significantly increased highway maintenance costs. These shifts can be induced by changes in the regulatory or fiscal policies governing transportation or by physical changes in the transportation infrastructure. As an example, the abandonment of a set of branch lines is analyzed to determine the increased highway maintenance costs that would result if all shipments currently carried by rail along the branch lines were diverted to truck transportation. A background of the transportation management systems and their application to transportation planning is provided.

Modeling Incremental Pavement Deterioration by Integrating Pavement and Intermodal Management System Data Bases

The U.S. Congress mandated the development of six transportation management systems with the passage of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991. Each of these management systems provides transportation planners with an inventory of transportation facilities and associated performance data that can be used to relate the performance of the facility. Toward the end of achieving better transportation planning, the management systems can be further integrated to yield a powerful transportation planning tool that can be used to analyze and quantify the pavement needs of intermodal facilities. Pavement designers can use this tool for traffic forecasting to allow more representative pavement designs. Transportation planners can also use this tool to predict the results of changes in shipping practices before they occur. The described procedure greatly enhances the transportation planning process by allowing the process to be more proactive rather than reactive. Modal shifts in freight traffic can result in significantly increased highway maintenance costs. These shifts can be induced by changes in the regulatory or fiscal policies governing transportation or by physical changes in the transportation infrastructure. As an example, the abandonment of a set of branch lines is analyzed to determine the increased highway maintenance costs that would result if all shipments currently carried by rail along the branch lines were diverted to truck transportation. A background of the transportation management systems and their application to transportation planning is provided.

The impact of inflation upon U.S. highway maintenance and construction costs

Over the past ten years, per mile costs for highway maintenance and construction have risen much faster than general wholesale and retail prices in the U.S. economy. This paper examines historical data on highway maintenance costs, highway construction costs, and general wholesale prices in order to help explain the disproportionate impact of inflation upon highway costs and to project future highway costs increases through 1985. Time-series regressions are used to model highway costs increases as functions of cost increases in the general wholesale sector. Results indicate that construction costs respond quickly to economic changes, with average cost increases 1 1 2 times the general inflation rate. In contrast, maintenance costs tend to be more stable over time and respond slowly to inflationary pressures. These differences can be attributed to differences in the contractual procedures which state and local governments use to supply maintenance and construction. Finally, an examination of highway expenditure increases legislated by the Surface Transportation Assistance Act of 1978 indicates that they are insufficient to compensate for expected cost increases.