Assessing the Economic Benefits from the Implementation of New Pavement Construction Methods

This report is organized in the following way: Section 2 provides a brief overview of the current state of the art in road building technologies and methods. The new methods of road building and maintenance that are being advocated are described in detail in Section 3. In Section 4, the attributes of the sample of roadway sections selected for analysis are identified and the methodology is described. Section 5 compares the differential costs of old and new approaches to pavement technologies as well as discusses calculations of the projected savings to Caltrans if it were to adopt the new approach as standard practice in roadway maintenance and rehabilitation. Section 6 contains estimates of the differential returns from the application of different types of new pavement technology including, increased compaction, use of a tack coat, and use of a rich bottom layer. Section 7 contains the summary and conclusions.