Monitoring the Productivity of a State Highway Maintenance Program

1983 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodore H. Poister
Keyword(s):  
Highway Maintenance ◽  
State Highway ◽  
Maintenance Program

Large-Scale Customer Feedback on a State Highway Maintenance Program

1998 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 294-305 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodore H. Poister ◽  
Richard H. Harris ◽  
Joseph Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Customer Service ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Sampling Strategy ◽  
Public Works ◽  
Highway Maintenance ◽  
State Highway ◽  
Maintenance Program ◽  
Improved Performance ◽  
Transportation Departments ◽  
Traditional Performance

Public works agencies are focusing increasingly on the concepts of quality and customer service in response to growing demands for accountability and improved performance. In an effort to gauge customers' satisfaction with the services they provide, state transportation departments are beginning to solicit feedback from their customers to complement more traditional performance measures. This article reports the findings of a large-scale survey of the principal customers of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation's highway maintenance program. The sample size and the disproportionally stratified sampling strategy were aimed at providing reliable data for 67 individual county-level maintenance units. The results indicate widespread variation in motorists' ratings of road quality, which correlate moderately with more traditional engineering-oriented measures of road quality, but it is clear that they offer a different perspective on service quality, which transportation departments will have to learn more about if they are serious about improving customer satisfaction.

Don’t Pass Deferred Maintenance Costs to the Next Generation!: The Effects of Politics on State Highway Maintenance Spending

2021 ◽  
pp. 1087724X2110472
Author(s):  
Jiseul Kim
Keyword(s):  
Panel Data Analysis ◽  
Highway Maintenance ◽  
Public Infrastructure ◽  
Key Factors ◽  
Maintenance Costs ◽  
State Highway ◽  
Deferred Maintenance ◽  
Political Incentive ◽  
State And Local ◽  
Asset Preservation

Routine maintenance spending for public infrastructure is critical for reducing life-cycle costs, and improving asset preservation and quality. Yet, states focus more on building new roads and expansion than maintaining existing assets’ conditions. Deferred maintenance costs are transferred to the future taxpayers, and they will eventually pay the expensive price. So far, there is little academic endeavor to examine the determinants of state and local routine maintenance spending. This study uses a panel data analysis covering 47 states from 1995 to 2009 to examine the effects of politics on state highway routine maintenance spending. The study finds that political incentive and conflict are key factors delaying state highway routine maintenance spending. The re-election-minded governors and legislatures tend to allocate less funding to maintenance to satisfy the current taxpayers. The study further finds that politically-divided states spend less on highway maintenance due to higher transaction costs in the policy-making process.

Case Study of Highway Maintenance Management: Ohio’s County Work Plans

2003 ◽  
Vol 1824 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-76
Author(s):  
William C. Lozier ◽  
Mary Ellen Kimberlin ◽  
Robin Grant
Keyword(s):  
Cost Effective ◽  
The State ◽  
Maintenance Management ◽  
Highway Maintenance ◽  
Accounting Data ◽  
Implementation Quality ◽  
State Highway ◽  
Effective Manner ◽  
Highway Network ◽  
The 1960S

Maintaining the safety and mobility of the state highway network in a cost-effective manner is a top priority for any state department of transportation (DOT). As funding for major new infrastructure becomes scarce and traffic levels steadily rise, maximizing and maintaining the existing highway system becomes increasingly critical. For the Ohio DOT, the task of maintaining Ohio’s highways is massive. While only 35th in geographic size, the state of Ohio has the nation’s 5th-highest traffic volume traveling on the 4th-largest Interstate network and has the 2nd-largest bridge inventory. Traffic in Ohio has grown by 90% during the last 20 years, and this growth pattern is expected to continue. Ohio’s Interstate highways were built in the 1960s and have far exceeded their 20-year design life, creating an even greater need for effective highway maintenance. During the last 3 years, Ohio DOT adopted strategic initiatives to revamp the department’s maintenance management methods, improve practices, and optimize resource use. Focused on redefining, prioritizing, and tracking all maintenance resources, the department set out to combine planning, implementation, quality-review, and cost-accounting data into one manageable, easily accessed system. The product of this intensive effort, the Ohio DOT county annual work plans, is revolutionizing the way the department approaches maintenance management. Before the implementation of the work plans in July 2001, roadside conditions and maintenance efforts varied widely across the state. Following the inaugural year of the work plans, conditions were meeting statewide standards, reflecting the state’s new focus on more effectively managing Ohio’s transportation investment.

Mortality among New York State highway maintenance workers: 1958?1980

1995 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 225-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Syni-An Hwang ◽  
Edward F. Fitzgerald ◽  
Peter M. Herzfeld ◽  
A. Stark
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York State ◽  
Highway Maintenance ◽  
York State ◽  
State Highway

Pavement Management Perspective on Integrating Preventive Maintenance into a Pavement Management System

2003 ◽  
Vol 1827 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn A. Zimmerman ◽  
David G. Peshkin
Keyword(s):  
Preventive Maintenance ◽  
Effective Means ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Condition Index ◽  
Functional Condition ◽  
Pavement Management ◽  
Pavement Performance ◽  
Pavement Preservation ◽  
State Highway ◽  
Maintenance Program

Many transportation agencies use pavement preservation programs to manage their pavement assets cost-effectively. One important aspect of pavement preservation is the use of preventive maintenance treatments to improve the functional condition of the network and retard the overall rate of deterioration. Because preventive maintenance treatments are less expensive than resurfacing or reconstruction projects, a preventive maintenance program can provide a cost-effective means of meeting pavement performance goals. Pavement management systems support pavement preservation strategies in important ways. They assist in identifying and prioritizing preventive maintenance needs, justifying funding levels, and evaluating the long-term impacts of various preservation strategies. To date, many agencies have operated preventive maintenance activities in isolation from pavement management programs. However, many potential benefits can be gained from the closer integration of these two activities. A transportation agency that wishes to integrate preventive maintenance and pavement management might be required to make several changes. Specific technical areas in which changes might be needed include condition surveys and condition index calculations, pavement performance models, treatment rules, and program development. In addition, several institutional issues must be addressed to successfully integrate the two programs. Examples from state highway agencies illustrate possible solutions.

Whatever Happened to the Southern Chain Gang?

2019 ◽  
pp. 211-242
Author(s):  
Vivien Miller
Keyword(s):  
Critical Evaluation ◽  
Community Treatment ◽  
The Political ◽  
Institutional History ◽  
Treatment Concept ◽  
Highway Maintenance ◽  
Maintenance Program ◽  
New Community ◽  
High Level ◽  
Road Work

The chapter offers a critical evaluation of Florida’s post-1960s liberalizing corrections philosophy. Beginning with a devastating prison fire that killed thirty-eight prisoners in 1967, the chapter reevaluates traditional narratives that have cast the calamitous fire as the beginning of the end of Southern prison road work. The chapter uncovers an already ongoing institutional history where the movement away from Southern penal traditions mired in the political economy of the chain gang became part of a post-1960s turn toward new Sunbelt values of “corrections” and a new “community-treatment” concept ostensibly intended to offer prisoners vocational training, less high-level security supervision, and a role in community building. In an era of prison uprisings, prisoners’ rights suits, and desegregation of prisons, the chapter concludes that Florida’s highway maintenance program was simply redesigned road work and a Sunbelt version of “community corrections” masked as a liberalizing reform.

Service Life and Life of Service: The Maintenance Commitments

1998 ◽  
Vol 1650 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-9
Author(s):  
L. G. (Gray)Byrd
Keyword(s):  
Service Life ◽  
Service Research ◽  
Highway Maintenance ◽  
Repair Work ◽  
User Costs ◽  
Research And Innovation ◽  
Maintenance Program ◽  
Performance Specifications ◽  
Maintenance Policies ◽  
The Impact

The magnitude of today’s highway maintenance challenge, the impact of research on maintenance, basic objectives that should drive a maintenance program, and the progress made in meeting them over the last 4 decades are discussed. Highway maintenance should include the objectives of providing a consistently safe, comfortable, and efficient travel way for highway users and a safe environment for maintenance crews; providing optimum service life; maintaining as-built capacity and reliability; inviting, supporting, and using research and innovation; and performing with professionalism, competence, and diligence. Some of the challenges in meeting these objectives today are accelerating rates of deterioration, limited time available to work, complex interchanges and crowded rights-of-way, environmental restrictions, a litigious society, and public skepticism about all government functions. Three categories of responses are technologies, policies, and professionalism. A significant array of new, innovative tools and other products of research are making maintenance technology more effective. Maintenance managers need to be activists in promoting progressive policies in providing as-built capacity while performing maintenance and repair work and in procuring products and services. Maintenance policies should include recognition of user costs, use of performance specifications, fabrication of off-site repair components, design of repairable highway systems, use of corrosion-resistant materials, privatization of segments of the maintenance program, and establishment of an international maintenance technology reference program. Individual professionals must embrace continuing education, environmental sensitivity, community service, research and development, innovative management, and societal and political responsibilities.

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