Assessing Economic Benefits from Implementation of New Pavement Construction Methods

The benefits of pavement research are often presented in measures of interest to pavement engineers and managers. These pavement measures must be rationally converted to monetary measures so that the public and managers without pavement training can evaluate the return on their investment in pavement research. An evaluation of the economic costs and benefits of implementation of three recommendations for changes in flexible pavement design and construction is presented. The analysis was performed by using a full-cost model developed for transportation projects that includes direct agency costs, user costs, and safety costs. The analysis procedure was applied to a generic rehabilitation project of the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), the results of which were extrapolated to the state network. The results indicate potential savings of direct agency costs of hundreds of millions of dollars. The results were also applied to a set of rural Caltrans highway rehabilitation projects.

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