Preventive Maintenance for Recreational Trails

The growth in recreational trails owned by the State, Cities, Counties, and Park systems over the last 20 plus years has exploded. Most if not all efforts related to recreational trails over these years has been focused on construction of new trails. There have been little organized efforts in trail preservation and/or preventive maintenance (PM) methods to extend the usable life of the trails. The agencies that have a PM program for their recreational trails rely on treatments that started out as highway or street treatments that may have been modified for use on the trails. The goals of this research project were to study existing treatments and how effective they are, promote new methods, and promote regularly scheduled pavement preservation treatments for preserving trail systems.