1.1 Need for Highway Rehabilitation Projects
Most transportation infrastructure systems were built between 1950’s and 1980’s during the construction boom period were established with a 20-year life expectancy (FHWA 2002; Lee and Ibbs 2005). After the 2000’s these highways have created severe public concerns with regard to safety and regional economic problems. The resulting pavement degradation has been costly for road users in a number of ways; adversely affecting their safety, frequently causing severe traffic congestion, and resulting in the average driver wasting 67 hours and 32 extra gallons of fuel each year (A.I. Hasley, The Washington post 2013). A huge amount of money is necessary to restore the nationwide infrastructure. However, …show more content…
To analyze life time cost for infrastructure, generally factors such as initial cost, operating cost, maintenance and replacement cost and salvage value are included in LCCA. Especially, maintenance and rehabilitation projects (M&R) comprise a large proportion in early stage of projects (FHWA 2002). Therefore, exact data for M&R costs are essential to produce more exact LCCA for many design alternatives and to make an efficient …show more content…
If various factors are entered into the software, the software shows comparison in regards to all alternatives of a project and automatically computes LCCA. It is designed for two main purposes : to provide a practical tool for pavement designers who can use the results when developing pavement plans (FHWA 2004) and to provide educational and instructional tool for decision makers in pavement design. The software compute life cycle values for both agency and user costs at the same time with regard to rehabilitation project as well as new construction. Also, it provides deterministic and probabilistic modeling of LCCA. RealCost provides critical information for the overall decision making process, as an economic analysis tool, the optimized output from RealCost is just one solution of many alternatives (FHWA 2004). RealCost manual issued by Caltrans one of the leading State transportation agencies (STAs) developing LCCA, provide background data which includes maintenance and rehabilitation cost during the pavement’s life cycle by considering various regional, climatic, and physical aspects of highway which are critical factors for assuming life time costs. RealCost software can be used to compare future maintainance cost of various pavement design