Integrating social impact to bridge’s asset management plans

Understanding the socio-economic impacts that rural bridges have on states that are dependent on agricultural industry provides a valuable perspective for public transportation agencies to prioritise the allocation of bridge maintenance funds. Currently, low-volume bridges are at a disadvantage for being allocated maintenance funding in typical asset management programs due to the low average daily traffic statistics. This paper proposes a methodology to quantify the socio-economic impact of low-traffic bridges on farm-to-market roads using Social Return on Investment (SROI) for making asset management funding decisions. It also demonstrates how these rates can be used as a key performance indicator. It provides several alternatives to incorporate the SROI to current project prioritisation processes and to better allocate scarce maintenance funding. The paper finds that factors like road surface type and percentage of heavy vehicles influence a given asset’s SROI, potentially justifying investing in a low-volume bridge over others with higher traffic volumes. The paper concludes that current processes for asset management resource allocation are unintentionally overlooking the contribution of a farm state’s economy by relying on traffic volume as the primary measure of network utility.