Today’s market requires pavement owners to prolong the life and serviceability of their pavements. Funding for the maintenance and rehabilitation of pavements is often limited, forcing owners to be smart about how they manage their pavements. Below are recommended practices that can lead to success.
1. Be proactive, not reactive.
Maintaining roads in good condition can easily be achieved through timely, preventive maintenance treatments that are applied early in a pavement’s life. Preventive maintenance treatments are not only inexpensive to perform, but they help when it comes to sealing cracks and preventing the influx of water. Waiting until the pavement is severely deteriorated can lead to costly rehabilitation approaches.
2. Use a pavement management program.
A pavement management program helps you understand what you have and what condition it’s in. For these systems to be beneficial, information entered into them must be reliable, repeatable, and easily extracted. Programs that manage this type of network-level approach allow owners to predict future conditions, prioritize maintenance projects, and estimate funding needs.
3. Do your homework, eliminate the guesswork.
When making a project-specific maintenance or rehabilitation decision, it pays to spend some money upfront for testing. Spending money upfront can answer a variety of questions related to pavement condition, in place materials, and underlying conditions. Knowing these attributes helps in the identification of the most cost-effective solution that ultimately prolongs pavement life.
4. Communicate what you know.
It is important to understand pavement conditions, pavement life cycles, and underlying subgrade conditions. Those invested in the system should understand the impacts of budget reductions on the entire system. Educate decision-makers about funding needs. They should understand what is needed to maintain the network, as well as to improve network conditions.
The Pavement Consulting Group at Braun Intertec has worked with a multitude of owners to successfully manage their pavement networks. Our experts are knowledgeable in the analysis and evaluation of existing pavements, the design and construction of new pavements, as well as pavement management. For more information about the services we can provide, please contact Amy Grothaus at 651.261.7122.