01474743

Component

The New Zealand Ministry of Transport has stated that reducing transportation costs should be a key outcome of the use of the National Land Transport Fund. Road roughness contributes to the cost of transportation through factors such as fuel consumption, repairs and maintenance, and tyre wear. The cost due to roughness may be only a few cents per vehicle kilometre travelled (VKT), but with circa 20 billion VKT on the State Highway network each year the total cost can be significant. Currently the performance of the State Highway network is measured using the International Roughness Index (IRI) and Smooth Travel Exposure (STE); however, neither quantifies the cost due to roughness and neither are suitable surrogates. This paper presents a proposed new performance indicator, the Vehicle Operating Cost Index (VOCi) which returns the average vehicle operating cost due to road roughness per VKT. The VOCi has been applied to the entire New Zealand State Highway network, with results presented for each State Highway functional classification, at both the national and regional levels. Although nationally the magnitude and variability of VOCi reduces with increasing functional classification, as is consistent with appropriate stewardship of the asset taking account of the relative functional importance of the route, the same relationship does not always exist at the regional level. It should be noted, however, that the VOCi, like any other indicator of its kind, is only part of the information available to decision makers and will not negate the need to ‘drill-down’ to determine if there are any underlying reasons behind uncharacteristic values.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AFD10 Pavement Management Systems.

01470560

13-1265
13-1265

English

14p

2013

Transportation Research Board 92nd Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Appendices; Figures; References; Tables

Cost indexes; Mathematical models; Operating costs; Pavement performance; Performance measurement; Roughness

New Zealand

Highways; Pavements; I22: Design of Pavements, Railways and Guideways

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2013 Paper #13-1265

PRP, TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Feb 5 2013 12:21PM