01658951

Component

In the United States, oversight agencies such as the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Federal Highway Administration, and the Government Accountability Office are responsible for the measuring and monitoring the overall accountability of state highway agencies. To help these oversight bodies to carry out this task, it is often useful to show the extent to which the infrastructure repair expenditure and other state specific factors, at an aggregate level, influence the average condition of infrastructure. Doing this will facilitate the establishment of a methodology that these oversight agencies can use to assess the performance of the individual compared to other states. To address this issue, this paper uses interstate highway bridge decks as a case study to compare the states’ interstate bridge deck average expenditures, condition and the deterioration factor values. The unit of observation in this paper is the state, thus, the analysis is aggregate in nature and does not consider design-specific or site-specific variables. The paper recognizes that there exist jurisdiction-specific variables that affect interstate bridge deck condition, and therefore attempts to remove some of this bias by normalizing the expenditure as a ratio of the inventory size and by considering state-specific values of the key deterioration variables. The paper also offers plausible explanations of the observed differences in the resulting overall performance across the states.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABC30 Standing Committee on Performance Management.

18-05025

English

16p

2018

Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Bridge decks; Case studies; Cluster analysis; Condition surveys; Deterioration; Expenditures; Highway bridges; States

Bridges and other structures; Highways; Maintenance and Preservation; Planning and Forecasting

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2018 Paper #18-05025

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 8 2018 11:15AM