Pavement management

Pavement management is the process of planning the maintenance and repair of a network of roadways or other paved facilities in order to optimize pavement conditions over the entire network. It is also applied to airport runways and ocean freight terminals. In effect, every highway superintendent does pavement management. Pavement management incorporates life cycle costs into a more systematic approach to minor and major road maintenance and reconstruction projects. The needs of the entire network as well as budget projections are considered before projects are executed, as the cost of data collection can change significantly. Pavement management encompasses the many aspects and tasks needed to maintain a quality pavement inventory, and ensure that the overall condition of the road network can be sustained at desired levels. While pavement management covers the entire lifecycle of pavement from planning to maintenance in any transport infrastructure, road asset management and road maintenance planning target more specifically road infrastructure. In the United States, the introduction of the Governmental Accounting Standards Board’s (GASB’s) Statement 34 is having a dramatic impact on the financial reporting requirements of state and local governments. Introduced in June 1999, this provision recommends that governmental agencies report the value of their infrastructure assets in their financial statements. GASB recommends that government agencies use a historical cost approach for capitalizing long-lived capital assets; however, if historical information is not available, guidance is provided for an alternate approach based on the current replacement cost of the assets. A method of representing the costs associated with the use of the assets must also be selected, and two methods are allowed by GASB. One approach is to depreciate the assets over time. The modified approach, on the other hand, provides an agency more flexibility in reporting the value of its assets based upon the use of a systematic, defensible approach that accounts for the preservation of the asset.