Decision making for maintenance and rehabilitation of municipal pavements

Municipalities in Canada spend in excess of $10 billion annually on aging infrastructure. Asset management systems, of which pavement management systems are a subset that have been in place for over 30 years, explicitly recognize the importance of maintenance and rehabilitation planning to ensure that our infrastructure assets remain viable. These systems also recognize the importance of costs in decision making, whether in terms of sound economic theory, optimum strategies, or cost efficiency. The main challenge facing municipalities is not which pavement preservation treatment should be used on a particular section, but rather, to justify that a preservation treatment is in fact necessary. The decision making (planning) process has a major impact on the condition of the pavement network and on the life-cycle cost of maintaining it. Planning should be based on well-documented pavement preservation needs. A successful priority planning process is a valuable decision-support tool. It can provide agencies with many benefits and management improvements including: an up-to-date inventory of the road network and its condition; a summary listing of current and future pavement maintenance and rehabilitation needs; trends in the condition of the pavement network; a prioritized listing of pavement maintenance and preservation needs using sound technical analysis; and a summary of unmet needs (infrastructure deficit). This paper will present a logical process of identifying and prioritizing needs at the network level of the yearly management cycle and will focus on levels of service, pavement inventory, identification of needs, and the prioritization of needs. For the covering abstract of this conference see ITRD number E211395.