Service Life and Life of Service: The Maintenance Commitments

The magnitude of today’s highway maintenance challenge, the impact of research on maintenance, basic objectives that should drive a maintenance program, and the progress made in meeting them over the last 4 decades are discussed. Highway maintenance should include the objectives of providing a consistently safe, comfortable, and efficient travel way for highway users and a safe environment for maintenance crews; providing optimum service life; maintaining as-built capacity and reliability; inviting, supporting, and using research and innovation; and performing with professionalism, competence, and diligence. Some of the challenges in meeting these objectives today are accelerating rates of deterioration, limited time available to work, complex interchanges and crowded rights-of-way, environmental restrictions, a litigious society, and public skepticism about all government functions. Three categories of responses are technologies, policies, and professionalism. A significant array of new, innovative tools and other products of research are making maintenance technology more effective. Maintenance managers need to be activists in promoting progressive policies in providing as-built capacity while performing maintenance and repair work and in procuring products and services. Maintenance policies should include recognition of user costs, use of performance specifications, fabrication of off-site repair components, design of repairable highway systems, use of corrosion-resistant materials, privatization of segments of the maintenance program, and establishment of an international maintenance technology reference program. Individual professionals must embrace continuing education, environmental sensitivity, community service, research and development, innovative management, and societal and political responsibilities.