Why pavement management?
Pavement management saves paving and maintenance costs, protects the value of this expensive asset and is environmentally friendly when it is fully implemented minimizing the number of times a pavement requires reconstruction. Pavement management has been a recognized dicipline in the engineering and public works communities since the United States Corps of Engineers began the study of managing airfield pavement in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Pavement management is a subset of infrastructure management and as our paved assets age it becomes increasingly important.
The United States Government ties much if not all of their funding for roadways and runways (individual State Departments of Transportation and Airports) to the recipient's use of a pavement management system. The Federal Government does this to maximize the longevity of the paved asset they are assisting in paying for.
Almost all local cities, counties, townships, and state and regional governments utilitze pavement management in one form or another. Although there is approximately as much parking lot/non-roadway pavement as their is roadway pavement pavement management is usually not used in the non-roadway sector.
Many of the current techniques used by professional pavement managers require the collection of multiple pavement distress criteria and involve the use of sophisticated and ever changing mathematical formulas. These approaches are useful but they generate efficiencies at orders of cost magnitudes that are simply not effective or attractive on parking lot pavement and owners we communicate with are not willing to go to the expense of collecting and analyzing so much data.
The genesis of this website is the approach that perhaps eighty to ninety percent of the gross benefits of pavement management may be garnered by the owners of private or non-roadway pavement by using simple and effective methods of visual evaluations, accurate and comprehensive project development and diciplined, regular and appropriate maintenance.
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