User Cost Models for Pavement Maintenance and Rehabilitation Alternatives in Highway Work Zones

When a pavement section experiences a loss of serviceability, the Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) identifies alternate rehabilitation and replacement strategies to restore that pavement section. Recommendation of a preferred alternative follows a Life Cycle Cost Analysis (LCCA) and lane-delay analysis of all the feasible alternatives. The costs considered by the ODOT in the LCCA include agency costs, namely: (i) capital cost of undertaking the work; and (ii) future maintenance costs. User delay is used as a subjective input during pavement strategy selection. When assessing the cost of an alternative, the cost of the work and its related user costs due to increase in travel time during construction should be taken into account. Current ODOT approach is to refrain from integrating user costs with agency costs. However, for the future, it is ODOT’s intent to use “User Delay Costs” as a separate tool, with ODOT’s LCCA method, for decision makers to better understand the implications of the decisions being made. This research was initiated to recommend simple models to evaluate additional road user costs in work zones. A computer program has been developed for this purpose. The costs computed by this software are to be used as a standalone analysis, but with the LCCA of pavement rehabilitation alternatives. The usefulness of this research is to give ODOT’s administrators sound engineering information that would allow the department to balance the fiscal restrictions against the relative costs to the motoring public.