Is local road maintenance meeting the community's needs? Available to Purchase

This paper presents the methodology and preliminary outcomes of an Austroads (Association of Australian Federal and State Road Agencies) National Strategic Research Programme (NSRP) project and the results of two consulting projects that assessed the community's expectations of levels of service on local roads. All of these projects made an estimated and objective assessment of the community's expectations of levels of service on various local road samples. In addition, the NSRP project estimated what the community expectations mean in terms of the annual maintenance and rehabilitation expenditure needed to achieve the lowest pavement life-cycle cost. This estimate was compared with samples of the actual current annual maintenance and rehabilitation on local roads. The latter comparison was made on a plot of maintenance expenditure against level of service for the local roads sampled and provided a preliminary assessment of whether maintenance funding is adequate, in life-cycle cost terms, in meeting the community's expectations of levels of service.