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Pavement Management is a term used professionally in the Civil Engineering community
to describe the process of managing pavement. It usually refers to inventorying
a system of pavement for its condition, use and quantity and then planning for its
maintenance, rehabilitation and possible replacement using the most efficient methods
possible.
In large systems of pavement (i.e. hundreds of lane miles) pavement management systems
can be very complex and look at very small kinds of differences in asphalt mix design,
loading types, pavement thicknesses, etc. The study of these details may yield
less than a percent increase in the effective use of maintenance monies. On
a system where tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars are spent annually on
pavement maintenance and rehabilitation saving even a half a percent on costs is
significant!
Unfortunately, the same scales of savings do not usually apply to privately owned
pavement. Here the most effective approaches are things that public agencies
have been doing for years but that are generally not widely accepted, known or practiced
in the non-roadway pavement community.
Things such as apples to apples bidding, bulk bidding, seasonal bidding, using accurate
and complete plans and specifications, construction testing, mandatory pre-bid project
walkthroughs, pre-construction meetings, weekly construction meetings, the use of
bonds, and the practice of performance based short listing of contractors.
These are all approaches that public agencies and professional pavement managers
use in controlling pricing on projects and insuring a quality and a low bid approach
to their new pavement and pavement maintenance.
Pavementmanagement.com is a website we have opened to assist non-roadway pavement
owners in managing and maintaining their expensive paved assets. I am a professional
Civil Engineer who has completed hundreds of new pavement and pavement maintenance
projects in the States of California,
Utah, Illinois, and Texas. I have 19 years of professional experience and have completed paving projects
at industrial yards, parking lots, race tracks, drag strips, campgrounds, high profile
projects (Governors Mansion), commercial sites and roadways.
I have noticed over the years the gap in experience and approach between professional
pavement managers employed by government agencies (state departments of transportation,
city and county roadway departments) and private non-governmental owners of pavements
such as facility and property managers.
Frequently the private owners of pavement are part-time pavement managers who do
not have the resources to manage their pavement to the level that a professional
might. Hiring me or another civil or geotechnical engineer may be too expensive
and may be overkill on many types of small new pavement and pavement maintenance
projects.
This website is an effort to make informational products available (eBooks, details,
specifications, contract documents and forms) so that the individual property or
facility manager or pavement owner has tools with which to manage their pavement
more effectively.
The informational resources we offer at Pavementmanagement.com deal with these issues
in detail and provide the non-roadway pavement owner a cost-effective alternative
to hiring a professional in managing their increasingly expensive paved assets.
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