Annual national highway maintenance expenditures increased from $6 billion in 1975 to $15 billion in 1983 and are still increasing each year. Maintenance needs for the highway system are increasing aswell, but the funds available for highway maintenance have been decreasing in real terms. The result is a growing gap between highway maintenance needs and available resources and an urgent need to improve the productivity and cost efficiency of highway maintenance operations. In this paper, a microeconomic-based approach for analyzing the allocation of aggregate resources (labor and equipment) and the characteristics of production in highway maintenance operations is presented. The proposed methodologies allow determination of the maximum quantity of any given maintenance activity that can be accomplished with given quantities of labor and equipment, identification of basic characteristics of the production process of a given maintenance activity, determination of the optimal (cost minimizing) combination of labor and equipment needed to perform a given level of maintenance activity, and estimation of the minimum cost of accomplishing any given amount of a specified maintenance activity. The validity ofthe results and the practical usefulness of the proposed methodology are limited, due primarily to data limitations. Recommendations regarding the needed highway maintenance data base are discussed. Themicroeconomic concepts of production and cost functions seem to provide a promising theoretical basis for analyzing the productivity and cost efficiency of highway maintenance operations. This paper appears in transportation research record no. 1215, Pavement management and rehabilitation.
Samenvatting