It is good practice to place winter maintenance services to private contractors. This provides sufficient capacities for road maintenance and operation at peak seasons, without the necessity of an uneconomic number of vehicles and personnel to be maintained by public services. Many European administrations are changing to transfer tasks of road administration and maintenance to private enterprises. In recent years many states have inaugurated new forms of using private enterprises to establish and operate projects of infrastructure: awarding concessions for construction, maintenance and operation of roads within public-private-partnership-models, in connection with the right to collect road tolls. These contracts have a long duration of up to 30 years after the initial construction period. Assigning a certain part of the road network to a licensee should include the possibility of defining the winter maintenance services road network separately. It may be advantageous to activate the resulting potential of optimization both for the licensee as well as for the organization(s) servicing the adjacent parts of the road network. An adequate diversification of risks should be observed when providing concessions, both on the part of the contractor and the concessionaire. Providing winter maintenance services implies the uncertainty of weather and climate conditions prevailing during the contract periods. This not only includes average conditions of past years, but must provide for extreme conditions as well. For the objective description of winter maintenance requirements the application of the Winter Indexes might be helpful. Special attention should be paid to the quality requirements regarding the services to be provided. This implies the definitionof impartial standards, resulting from the specific weather situation, inorder to establish a system of quality control. Lack of adherence to these quality standards should lead to contractual penalties, via definition of remuneration based on the disposability of the road. Furthermore concession contracts should include requirements for the documentation of road and weather conditions and services provided. In order to use these data within the scope of Winter Maintenance Management Systems (WMMS) specified details for data formats, data recording devices, etc may be necessary. For the covering abstract see ITRD E143097.
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