This paper shares the Saskatchewan Ministry of Highways and Infrastructure (SMHI) experience with new tools for communicating pavement preservation needs to senior management.
New performance measures were created and put into practice for development of the 2016-20 pavement preservation strategy. These high level performance measures quantify what the investment strategy will mean for road users and for taxpayers. The long term risks of underinvestment are conveyed showing the drop in road user acceptance levels and the financial burden for taxpayers.
The performance measures and their application that are discussed in the paper include:
Financial Sustainability – this index compares historic investment to the needed investment given the existing condition of the road network and the future preservation treatment regime needed to sustain today’s conditions. The index is best used to monitor investment overtime and understand if the current strategy is financially sustainable.
Bathtub Curve – this analysis informs decision makers of the cost to maintain current, improved or degraded pavement conditions. This gives guidance when selecting an investment strategy because it tells you how much it will cost to protect today’s conditions and the cost of embarking on a strategy to improve conditions or letting them fall off. Depending on the roads it may be cheaper to spend money on them now because the future financial cost of keeping them there is more affordable than what we are spending today.
Road User Acceptability – measuring road user acceptance for different road conditions allows additional information to be presented when considering investment strategies. SMHI has designed a method to gather road user acceptability information. The data from these surveys is used to assess investment options as having high, low or no impact on road user acceptability in terms of the level of service provided.
Maintenance Crew Response – setting standards for response times to potholes, road failures, removing hazards, etc. a measure of the operational level of service delivered to the road user. In Saskatchewan pavement maintenance as an integral component of our pavement management system and tradeoffs for operational service delivery vs. preventative maintenance practices are balanced in the overall asset management plan.
