User Costs in Life-Cycle Cost-Benefit (LCCB) Analysis of Bridges

In this paper a very brief presentation of a study of the importance of including user costs in life-cycle cost analysis in management systems for bridges is shown. A limited number of excerpts related to the importance of estimating user costs when repair of bridges are planned and when optimized strategies are formulated are shown. These excerpts clearly show that user costs in several cases completely dominate the total costs. In some cases the user costs are more than ten times higher than the repair costs. A simple example of how to relate and estimate user costs related to repair of a single bridge is shown. Finally, it is discussed how the total maintenance costs (including user costs) may be estimated for a large bridge stock.