Exploring the influence of pavement preservation, maintenance, and rehabilitation on Arkansas’ highway network: an education case study

There is significant literature available on pavement preservation, but the information available to date is highly regional and spread across several years, preventing a simple comparison. A new website, RoadResource.org, is now available that can compare twenty-two treatment types and quantifies the impact of these treatments through four calculators. The first calculator, Life Cycle Cost, indicated that treatments such as fog seals can save approximately 40 billion over a fifty year design period in the state of Arkansas compared to major mill and fills if applied across the entire network. The second calculator, Equivalent Annualized Cost, showed that the assumed life extension of a treatment can equate the cost of preservation treatments and rehabilitation treatments. The third calculator, Remaining Service Life, indicated that all twelve pavement preservation treatments provided a net gain in lane-kilometer-years, while only two of the nine rehabilitation/reconstruction treatments showed a net gain. Finally, the fourth calculator, Cost Benefit Value, showed promise as a tool to rank treatment strategies but appears to require human judgment for the inputs. RoadResource.org is a powerful tool that can help agencies better understand pavement preservation, maintenance, and rehabilitation.